Une évaluation empirique de la nouvelle tarification de l’assurance automobile (1992) au Québec
DOI: 10.7202/602222ar
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)
Summary
This paper evaluates the impact of the 1992 reform in automobile insurance pricing by the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) on road safety and actuarial fairness. Prior to 1992, the public insurance regime for bodily injuries utilized a uniform pricing structure that did not account for individual risk or incentivize prudent driving. The 1992 reform introduced a pricing system based on accumulated demerit points and license revocations, aiming to align premiums with individual risk profiles and encourage safer driving behavior through moral hazard incentives. The study seeks to determine whether this shift reduced accidents and infractions, and whether demerit points serve as a valid predictor of future accident risk. The authors employ a theoretical principal-agent model to demonstrate that linking future premiums to past performance (via demerit points) creates optimal incentives for prevention compared to static pricing. Empirically, the study utilizes a panel dataset comprising 261,096 observations from 42,498 drivers in Quebec, covering the period from April 1983 to March 1994. The data includes individual records of accidents, traffic infractions, and demerit points. To account for the panel nature of the data and control for confounding factors such as economic conditions and other regulatory changes, the authors estimate parameters using a Negative Binomial distribution with random effects. The analysis focuses on two main hypotheses: that the 1992 pricing change negatively affects the number of accidents and infractions, and that accumulated demerit points are a significant, increasing predictor of subsequent accidents. The results indicate that the 1992 pricing reform successfully reduced both the number of traffic infractions and accidents, thereby improving road safety. This reduction supports the conclusion that the new pricing structure effectively incentivized drivers to adopt more prudent behaviors. Furthermore, the study finds that the number of demerit points accumulated over a two-year period is a strong predictor of the number of accidents in the subsequent two-year period. This statistical relationship validates the SAAQ’s use of demerit points as a proxy for individual risk. Consequently, the reform achieved greater actuarial fairness by ensuring that higher-risk drivers paid higher insurance contributions, while simultaneously promoting prevention. The findings confirm that experience-rated pricing based on demerit points is both an effective tool for enhancing road safety and a fairer mechanism for risk allocation in public automobile insurance.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | OpenAlex-citations | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| archive | success | unpaywall | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-25 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: crash risk outcomes