Innovation in long-term care insurance: Joint contracts for mitigating relational moral hazard

A recent innovation is joint long-term care (LTC) insurance policies covering two related individuals. This contribution purports to find out whether they have the potential of mitigating relational moral hazard (RMH) effects. Intra-family moral hazard has been suspected of being responsible for the sluggish development of private LTC insurance. The parent, anticipating the informal care provided by a family member LTC, is tempted to buy less LTC coverage. The family member (or more generally, the partner of a senior person), knowing that the bequest is protected by LTC insurance, has less incentive to provide informal care. Since a joint LTC policy makes senior and partner decide simultaneously rather than sequentially, it may lead to a partial internalization of RMH effects by turning coverage purchased by the senior and informal care provided by the partner from strategic substitutes into strategic complements under certain conditions. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.