The John M. Olin Center

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58. Santosh Anagol, Shawn Cole & Shayak Sarkar, Comparative Regulation of Market Intermediaries: Insights from the Indian Life Insurance Market, 06/2014.

Abstract: In this chapter, we consider regulation of the sales of insurance as a means for reducing the amount of mis-selling that occurs. This chapter was inspired by a field experiment we conducted in India, in which we sent mystery shoppers to visit life insurance agents and solicit financial advice. The experiment and results are reported in Anagol et al. (2013). A key finding of the experiment was that life insurance gave unsuitable advice: for some types of clients, agents recommended the wrong product more than 80 percent of the time. Because Indian insurance law is a work-in-progress, we ground our analysis in a consideration of the regulatory regimes used to govern insurance sales in the United States.

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