The changing social, financial and regulatory frameworks, such as an increasingly aging society, the current low interest rate environment, as well as the implementation of Solvency II, lead to the search for new product forms for private pension provision. In order to address the various...

The changing social, financial and regulatory frameworks, such as an increasingly aging society, the current low interest rate environment, as well as the implementation of Solvency II, lead to the search for new product forms for private pension provision. In order to address the various...

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

Few retirees annuitize any wealth, a fact that has so far defied explanation within the standard framework of forward-looking, expected utility-maximizing agents. Bequest motives seem a natural explanation. Yet the prevailing view is that people with plausible bequest motives should annuitize...

This study utilizes a nationally representative proprietary dataset to examine the annuitization decisions of retirees. The results indicate that consulting a financial advisor, retirement duration, and risk aversion are positive predictors of annuity ownership. The results also indicate that...

The shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) private pension arrangements coupled with the widespread reluctance to annuitize retirement savings is causing growing economic concern in developed countries. This study considers the impact of the salient decision point made...

I investigate the strong negative relation between recent stock returns and the annuitization of retirement savings using a novel data set with over 100,000 actual payout decisions. After controlling for several standard explanations (e.g., wealth effects), I present evidence supporting naïve...

Even though smokers incur higher health expenditures than nonsmokers of the same age, smokers have significantly higher mortality rates, so the expected lifetime health expenditure for a smoker is actually lower than for a nonsmoker. Because of this fact, some politicians and policy-makers have...

Using UK microeconomic data, we analyze the empirical determinants of voluntary annuity market demand. We find that annuity market participation increases with financial wealth, life expectancy and education and decreases with other pension income and a possible bequest motive for surviving...

This paper solves an empirically parameterized model of households’ optimal demand for nominal and inflation indexed annuities. The model incorporates mortality, inflation, and real interest rate risk. The model draws some interesting predictions. First, the welfare calculations on the access...