The Income Elasticity of Nonlife Insurance: A Reassessment

In aggregate insurance regressions at the country level, the question whether insurance is a normal or superior good translates into whether income elasticity is significantly greater than one or not. Twenty‐five years after a seminal article, I reassess the income elasticity of nonlife insurance by means of homogeneous and heterogeneous versions of the common correlated effects estimator, controlling for common factors and individual trends and characterizing the average behavior of insurance markets while allowing for individual heterogeneity. The evidence supports the existence of a cointegrating behavior between insurance consumption and GDP and the view of nonlife insurance as a normal good.