Automobile insurance in Brazil: market concentration and demand

ABSTRACT This paper studies two aspects of the automobile insurance market in Brazil: first, it determines the degree of competition among insurance companies, and second, it estimates and analyzes the demand for automobile insurance. Most of the studies on the automobile insurance market in Brazil analyze the performance of the firms in this sector or present regional studies of the demand for insurance and its determinants. Thus, this study innovates both in showing the competition among the firms and estimating the demand for insurance in the country. The relevance of this research lies in the sequential and ordered way it analyzes the demand in a sector. Firstly, it identifies the type of competition that takes place in the sector and then, based on this, it proposes a structural framework based on optimizing decisions for estimating the price, income, and market power elasticities of demand. Furthermore, analyzing the insurance industry is of the utmost importance since it moves significant amounts of financial resources and provides an essential service in the economy. With information about the market structure and demand profile in the automobile insurance sector it is possible to propose strategic policies for individual firms as well as for the whole sector in order to introduce more efficiency. To analyze the degree of competitiveness, several concentration indices were calculated using annually-aggregated monthly data on the premium paid to all the automobile insurance firms in the period from 2001 to 2016. To estimate the demand for automobile insurance, half-yearly data from 2002 to 2010 for each one of the 27 federative units of Brazil were used. Two main findings are presented in this study. First, we find evidence of little concentration in the Brazilian automobile insurance market, with shares being well distributed among the players. Second, we estimate the demand for automobile insurance in Brazil and find a price-elasticity of -0.47 in the short run and -1.33 in the long run, while the lagged profitability has a negative impact on the amount insured: -0.21 in the short run and -0.59 in the long run. Income does not significantly influence the demand for insurance in Brazil