Although considerable research has been devoted to the study
of life insurance demand in developed countries, our understand-
ing of such demand in emerging markets remains very limited.
This void is unfortunate, not only because emerging markets pro-
vide ample growth opportunity for insurance companies, but also
because from the theoretical point of view, life insurance should
play a particularly important role in economies where the capital
market is less developed (Mayers and Smith, 1983). The latter also
indicates that the emerging market would be an ideal testing
ground for various hypotheses of life insurance demand. In this
paper, we use a unique dataset from China to test the life insurance
demand hypotheses found in the literature. A straightforward
hypothesis, based on a large body of literature, focuses on the