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.

中文翻译：

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为什么寿险保单持有人会失效？收入、健康和遗赠动机冲击的作用

我们提出并根据经验实施了人寿保险决策的动态离散选择模型，以评估各种因素在解释人寿保险失效方面的重要性。我们使用健康与退休研究中的人寿保险持有信息来估计模型。使用我们模型估计的反事实模拟表明，很大一部分人寿保险失效是由特殊冲击驱动的，与健康、收入和遗赠动机无关，尤其是当保单持有人相对年轻时。然而，随着其余保单持有人年龄的增长，这种独立同分布 (iid) 冲击的作用越来越小，而且他们的损失更多是由收入、健康或遗赠动机冲击驱动的。正如预期的那样，