An Empirical Study on Moral Hazard of Life Insurance : Evidence from Postal Insurance Market

Due to the difficulty in obtaining data on life insurance contracts, previous studies on moral hazard of life insurance are confined to conceptual discussion or surveys of Korean health panel. To fill this gap, using comprehensive data from Postal insurance market, we perform an empirical study on moral hazard of life insurance from the period of 2008 to 2013. Our empirical findings are summarized as follows. First, employing the Heckman (1979)'s two stage model, we find that having indemnity private health insurance increases the number and period of medical utilization. In addition, number of private health insurance has a positive and highly significant effect on the number of period of medical utilization. Our empirical finding indicates that in a life insurance market with asymmetric information, there exists a moral hazard in order to maximize economic utility.