Title: Life insurance and household consumption
Description: "In this paper, we use data of life insurance  holdings by age, sex, and marital status to infer how individuals value  consumption in different demographic stages.  Essentially, we use revealed  preference to estimate equivalence scales and altruism simultaneously in the  context of a fully specified model with agents facing U.S.  demographic features  and with access to savings markets and life insurance markets.  Our findings  indicate that individuals are very caring for their dependents, that there are  large economies of scale in consumption, that children are costly but wives  with children produce a lot of goods in the home and that while females seem to  have some form of habits created by marriage, men do not.  These findings  contrast sharply with the standard notions of equivalence scales"--Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia web site.
Subjects: Consumption (Economics), Life Insurance, Life insurance