To Claim or Not Claim? Friendly Societies In New Zealand, 1879-1884

Friendly societies were voluntary associations offering members sickness and medical insurance. By the end of the nineteenth century they were one of the most important forms of formal sickness and health insurance around the English-speaking world. A number of historians and economists have argued the competitive advantage of the friendly societies lay in their ability to monitor claims and curtail opportunism. This paper tests this claim, using a newly compiled panel dataset of societies operatingin in New Zealand in the 1870s and 1880s. The statistical material compiled by the New Zealand Registrar of friendly societies was of exceptional quality. Critically the Registrar collected information on the age structure of members in a large number of societies over a number of years. This allows us to test the impact of various behavioural and financial variables on claims rates, whilst controlling for the age of the members of a society. Regression analysis shows that branches were able to overcome moral hazard in the sense that members did not mechanistically respond to higher benefits scales by claiming more. However friendly societies faced diseconomies of scale. Larger, growing, and rural branches had higher claims rates, either because members responded a more fragile system of monitoring, or because they felt less of a sense of obligation to their society. Moreover an increase in the wealth of a society was associated with an increase in sickness claims. This suggests that members adjusted their behaviour in response to society’s ability to pay, and/or that societies sanctioned more claims when times were good. These two results indicate that members often worked through ill health but were able to claim if a society’s finances were in good health.