Policyholder Exercise Behavior in Life Insurance: The State of Affairs

Abstract

The paper presents a review of structural models of policyholder behavior in life insurance. We first discuss underlying drivers of policyholder behavior in theory and survey the implications of different models. We then turn to empirical behavior and appraise how well different drivers explain observations. The key contributions lie in the synthesis and the systematic categorization of different approaches. The paper should provide a foundation for future studies, and we describe some important directions for future research in the conclusion.