【Empirical Seminar】Life Insurance, Natural Disasters, and Human Capital Investment: A Case of Early 20th Century Japan
2025/04/22
研討會日期 : 2025-04-22
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Toshihiro Okubo
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Han Yang
演講者簡介 : Professor Toshihiro Okubo received his Ph.D. in International Relations and Economics from the Graduate Institute, Geneva and the University of Geneva in 2005. He is currently a Professor at the Keio University. His research interests are International Trade, Foreign Direct Investment, New Economic Geography (Geography and Trade), Environmental Economics (Environment and Trade), Regional Science, and Telework/Digitalization.
演講摘要 : In this paper we examine the role of life insurance in buffering the effects of large negative income shocks on schooling. To this end we focus on boys' and girls' middle school grade promotion rates in case of serious earthquake disasters in early 20th century Japan. We constructed a dataset on grade promotions by gender, life insurance claims, and information on the deadliness of earthquakes, at the prefecture-level. Our results using mediation analysis indicate that life insurance was consistently able to buffer the negative impact of earthquakes on the promotion of boys to higher grades, where this effect becomes larger the more deadly an earthquake is. In contrast, for girls, insurance acts to reduce the fall in middle school promotion only for some grades or only for very large earthquakes.
