This paper analyzes the savings and health care impacts of mortality contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life-insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life-insurance...

Our analysis shows that Pareto's instincts were right, for under certain assumptions, personal distributions of income tend to be similar even when the underlying functional determinants are quite different. We prove that if the initial functional income distribution is sufficiently "compact" -...