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In the past two decades, many emerging economies have been witnessed the strong growth of their life insurance industry. While research in the demand for life insurance has attracted much attention since the 1960s, most studies have focused on cross‐country studies or well‐established markets in developed countries. As a result of cross‐national variations in life insurance consumption, it has been argued in the literature that factors shaping the demand for life insurance are complex and varied from one country to another. This paper aims to examine key determinants of the demand for life insurance in China with a view to explaining the rapid growth of the life insurance industry in China since its economic reform in 1978. Empirical investigation using a time series data analysis has shown that the main factors which have influenced people in China to purchase life insurance products are directly associated with the successful economic reform leading people to progress to higher layers of economic security, the increase in the level of education and the change in social structure. However, this research has not found a negative effect of inflation on life insurance consumption, even China experienced high inflation in the mid‐1990s.

There has been considerable debate on the linear relationship between systematic risk and return. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether security return can be explained by systematic risk.

This study employs the market model to test the effect of excess return on portfolio returns. The paper divides total risk into systematic and idiosyncratic risk to examine whether the degree of inefficient portfolio diversification impairs the applicability of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). In the two‐pass cross‐sectional regressions, the paper assesses whether excess return on a security is directly proportional to the security's beta. The paper also incorporates the total variance of securities and the squared value of beta to capture idiosyncratic risk and the nonlinear risk‐return relationship.

The CAPM is rejected due to positive intercepts in most portfolios and there are large proportions of idiosyncratic risk in these portfolios. Two‐pass regressions show that the security market line theory is valid when additional variables are included in the equation. However, survivorship bias appears to be present in the selected sample.

Since large excess returns are present in the models, the traditional CAPM is rejected and incomplete portfolio diversification can be explained by high levels of idiosyncratic risk.

The authors find that inefficient portfolio diversification is due to the level of idiosyncratic risk in a portfolio. Evidence of the nonlinear beta‐return relationship suggests that the traditional CAPM is misspecified.

Given the increasing importance of engineering insurance, it is still unclear which specific factors can enhance the role of engineering insurance as a risk transfer tool. This study aims to propose a hybrid approach to identify and analyze the key determinants influencing the consumption of engineering insurance in mainland China.

The empirical analysis utilizes provincial data from mainland China from 2008 to 2019. The research framework is a novel amalgamation of the generalized method of moments (GMM) model, the quantile regression (QR) technique and the random forest (RF) algorithm. This innovative hybrid approach provides a comprehensive exploration of the driving factors while also allowing for an examination across different quantiles of insurance consumption.

The study identifies several driving factors that significantly impact engineering insurance consumption. Income, financial development, inflation, price, risk aversion, market structure and the social security system have a positive and significant influence on engineering insurance consumption. However, urbanization exhibits a negative and significant effect on the consumption of engineering insurance. QR techniques reveal variations in the effects of these driving factors across different levels of engineering insurance consumption.

This study extends the research on insurance consumption to the domain of the engineering business, making theoretical and practical contributions. The findings enrich the knowledge of insurance consumption by identifying the driving factors specific to engineering insurance for the first time. The research framework provides a novel and useful tool for examining the determinants of insurance consumption. Furthermore, the study offers insights into the engineering insurance market and its implications for policymakers and market participants.