Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

4-2013

Abstract

Asymmetric information is an important phenomenon in many markets and in particular in insurance markets. Testing for asymmetric information has become a very important issue in the literature in the last two decades. Almost all testing procedures that are used in empirical studies are parametric, which may yield misleading conclusions in the case of misspecification of either functional or distributional relationships among the variables of interest. Motivated by the literature on testing conditional independence, we propose a new nonparametric test for asymmetric information, which is applicable in a variety of situations. We demonstrate that the test works reasonably well through Monte Carlo simulations and apply it to an automobile insurance dataset and a long-term care insurance (LTCI) dataset. Our empirical results consolidate Chiappori and Salanié’s findings that there is no evidence for the presence of asymmetric information in the French automobile insurance market. While Finkelstein and McGarry found no positive correlation between risk and coverage in the LTCI market in the United States, our test detects asymmetric information using only the information that is available to the insurance company, and our investigation of the source of asymmetric information suggests some sort of asymmetric information that is related to risk preferences as opposed to risk types and thus lends support to Finkelstein and McGarry.

Keywords

Automobile insurance, Conditional independence, Distributional misspecification, Functional misspecification, Long-term care insurance, Nonlinearity

Discipline

Econometrics | Economics

Research Areas

Econometrics

Publication

Journal of Business and Economic Statistics

Volume

31

Issue

2

First Page

208

Last Page

225

ISSN

0735-0015

Identifier

10.1080/07350015.2012.755127

Publisher

Taylor and Francis

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1080/07350015.2012.755127

Download

Included in

Econometrics Commons

Share

COinS