TY - JOUR T1 - Marital bargaining in the demand for life insurance: evidence from the Health and Retirement Study JF - Review of Economics of the Household Y1 - 2015 A1 - Edwin S. Wong KW - End of life decisions KW - Insurance KW - Net Worth and Assets KW - Other AB - A vast literature explores life insurance from the perspective of a single individual. This paper considers an alternative approach by developing and testing a theoretical model for term life insurance demand by married households over age 50. Allowing for joint, cooperative decision making between spouses, empirical findings show that increasing the relative bargaining power of husbands results in reductions in the size of the insurance policies covering the lives of husbands in a manner consistent with theory. The intuition is that households reallocate resources to states of nature that husbands place greater weight by reducing the amount spent on purchasing insurance covering the lives of husbands. In contrast, marital bargaining power generally has a substantially smaller effect in the demand for life insurance covering the lives of wives. However, when bargaining power is shifted towards husbands, life insurance coverage increases among the subsample of wives who provide a large proportion of total household income and are more likely to require protection against lost future income in the event of death. PB - 13 VL - 13 IS - 2 N1 - Times Cited: 0 0 U4 - life Insurance/household income/decision Making/Bargaining ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Gender preference and transfers from parents to children: an inter-regional comparison JF - International Review of Applied Economics Y1 - 2013 A1 - Edwin S. Wong KW - Adult children KW - Cross-National KW - Demographics KW - Methodology KW - Net Worth and Assets AB - This paper examines whether parents exhibit gender preference in the allocation of family resources to their adult children. Gender preference is defined in the context of an altruistic model for inter-vivos transfer from parents to children extended to include educational investment. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (United States) and the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing are used to show that the degree of gender preference differs across these culturally distinct regions. Among Korean families, empirical results point to male preference as sons receive larger inter-vivos transfers and attain higher levels of education compared with daughters. In contrast, the evidence pertaining to gender preference among American families points to daughter preference as inter-vivos transfers and educational investment is generally higher among female adult children. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT PB - 27 VL - 27 IS - 1 U4 - gender preference/gender/cross-national comparison/Cross Cultural Comparison/inter Vivos Transfers/Families/Sex preselection/Resource allocation/Living trusts/parent Child Relations ER -