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Racial Discrimination In Life Insurance, William G. Gale, Kyle D. Logue, Nora Cahill, Rachel Gu, Swati Joshi

Law & Economics Working Papers

We examine the historical and statistical relationship between race and life insurance. Life insurance can play a central role in households’ financial security. Race has played an important and changing role in the provision of life insurance in the U.S. from slave insurance before the Civil War, to “Scientific Racism” continuing into the 20th century, to policies that do not explicitly mention race in recent decades. In empirical work using new data, we confirm earlier work showing that Black individuals have higher life insurance coverage rates than white individuals, controlling for observable characteristics. We find no difference in the likelihood …