Life Insurance and Household Consumption

摘要

We have used LI purchases to infer how people assess consumption across different family circumstances. We estimated utility functions for men and women that depend on marital status. We have learned that children are quite expensive; that females are better at home production than males; and that marriage increases the marginal utility of consumption for females when they are no longer married. With our estimates, we assessed the effects of some Social Security policies, and we found that eliminating survivor's benefits can be accommodated via larger LI purchases in the case of the death of the male, but that it also implies a small reduction in female well-being and a much smaller improvement in male well-being.