The effect of experiencing a death on life insurance ownership

Though there is a huge literature on the demand for life insurance, it heavily focuses on demographic and economic factors. This study fills the gap in the current literature by incorporating psychological factor such as an experiencing a death in family members. The goal of this paper is to investigate the effect of death experience on life insurance ownership. Using a data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find evidence that there is positive association between a death experience and life insurance demand. Also, the model is better explained when both situational and dispositional factors are jointly examined. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.