This study examines the relationships among three health status indicators (self-perceived health status, objective health status, and future health risk) and life insurance holdings in 16 European countries. Our results show that households with poor self-perceived health status and high future health risk are less likely to purchase life insurance in the entire sample as well as in the subsample for countries with a national health system (NHS). In non-NHS countries, those households that have high future health risk are less inclined to purchase life insurance. In terms of preferences for types of life insurance policies (term life, whole life, both, or none) in the whole sample, poor self-perceived health status and high future health risk are less inclined to hold only term life insurance policy. In addition, poor self-perceived health status and high future health risk have a negative impact on holdings of both types of life insurance. Our findings reveal that there is no adverse selection problem in the life insurance market, especially in European countries with NHS.

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This paper investigates a widespread trend in the Taiwanese automobile insurance market in which the loss claims of vehicle damage insurance contracts have a high propensity to occur just before the end of the policy year (as opposed to calendar year). We show that certain uncommon characteristics of claim data are consistently observed in the last policy month. We indirectly show that there is a severe timevarying excess claim problem in this market. The major sources of excess claims can be explained by the bonus-malus system problem and the auto-dealer incentive issue.

In this study, the relationships between vehicle characteristics and automobile accidents are examined based on physical damage insurance claims data from a major property insurance company in Taiwan. For the whole sample, we find that the car characteristics index (an estimate for the replacement cost associated with claims) is negatively correlated with the claim probability and positively correlated with claim severity. New cars and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) (compared with Sedans) are associated with higher claim probability. However, SUVs (compared with Sedans) are associated with lower claim severity. Small (compared with large) vehicles are associated with lower claim probability and lower claim severity. Compared with the imported cars from Germany, policyholders with the imported cars from Japan or the US are more likely to file a claim but to have lower claim severity. On subgroup analyses, the relationship between car characteristics index and claim probability is positive for domestic cars and negative for imported cars, implying that imported car policies subsidize domestic car policies. We also find the impacts of vehicle characteristics on claim probability and claim severity differ for domestic cars and imported cars in subsamples. Our empirical evidence provides important implications for premium pricing in the automobile physical damage insurance industry.

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