Why do life insurance policyholders lapse? The roles of income, health, and bequest motive shocks
构建并实证估计了一个寿险决策的动态离散选择模型，利用健康与退休研究数据发现，退保主要由与健康、收入和遗赠动机无关的异质性冲击驱动，尤其在年轻时；随着年龄增长，收入、健康和遗赠动机冲击的作用逐渐增强。
Abstract We present and empirically implement a dynamic discrete choice model of life insurance decisions to assess the importance of various factors in explaining life insurance lapsation. We estimate a model using information on life insurance holdings from the Health and Retirement Study. Counterfactual simulations using the estimates of our model suggest that a large fraction of life insurance lapsations are driven by idiosyncratic shocks, uncorrelated with health, income, and bequest motives, particularly when policyholders are relatively young. As the remaining policyholders get older, however, the role of such independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) shocks gets smaller, and more of their lapsation is driven by income, health, or bequest motive shocks. As anticipated, income and health shocks are relatively more important than bequest motive shocks in explaining lapsation when policyholders are young, with bequest motive shocks playing a more important role as we age.