COVID-19, InsurTech, and Traditional Insurance

-Evidence from Monthly City-Level Panel Data during Pandemic

时间：9月28日14:00-15:30

地点：承泽园245教室

主讲人：魏薇

摘要：How to meet residents’ medical care demand under the new normal of COVID-19 containment? InsurTech becomes a possible answer to this crucial issue, which secures livelihood of the mass as bottom line. This paper focuses on traditional insurance and InsurTech-enabled mutual aid under the shock of COVID-19, and further compares their different roles in health security during pandemic. Based on monthly city-level panel data between January 2019 and May 2020, our main findings are as follow. First, mutual aid responds positively towards COVID-19 shock with members and benefits paid growing with local confirmed cases, while traditional insurance shows no significant change. Second, mutual aid works heterogeneously, that is, it functions more evidently within areas with broader coverage of mobile payment and inclusive finance, groups trusting more on technology and mutual scheme, and groups like mobile individuals with limited access to traditional insurance. Third, the preceding results remains robust after changing variable measurement, econometric model, and removing subsample of Hubei province. The conclusion has great policy implication for post-pandemic insurance security, indicating that we should utilize technology advantage to reach vulnerable groups, push forward digital transformation of traditional insurance industry, and develop health system with multilevel and multiform.

主讲人介绍：魏薇，北京大学国家发展研究院2019级金融学专业博士生，研究领域为金融科技，目前关注的研究话题包括保险科技、金融投资等。