Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments June 2001 erstellt
Description:
This paper examines the importance of legal rights and enforcement in influencing property-casualty insurance consumption. We extend the existing literature by examining the role both legal and political factors have on determining insurance density across countries. Also, measures of risk aversion, loss probability and price, which overcome limitations of proxies used in the existing literature on insurance demand are analysed. Using a panel data set we apply the GMM dynamic system estimator, which relaxes the assumption of strict exogeneity of the regressors and produces unbiased and efficient estimates. The results show a strong positive relationship between the protection of property rights and insurance consumption, which is robust to various model specifications and estimation techniques. Moreover, the results show the purchase of nonlife insurance is significantly and positively related to risk aversion, loss probability and income, and negatively related to price