Optimal Decision of Dynamic Wealth Allocation with Life Insurance for Mitigating Health Risk under Market Incompleteness

This research proposes a dynamic control modeling of income allocation between life insurance purchase and consumption subject to market incompleteness. We adopt a no-good-deal specification of the multiplicity of stochastic discount factors, and treat death as a stopping time on the individual’s health status. Health status non-tradability renders death risk non-hedgeable and the life insurance market incomplete. The no-good-deal condition provides useful guidance for individuals to choose the insurance-income ratio inside good-deal bounds. The magnitude of the influence of market incompleteness on life insurance demand (measured as the width of good-deal bounds) displays life-cycle patterns that converge over time and are highly sensitive to health status characteristics