Unfunded defined-benefit (DB) public pension plans throughout the world are being converted to funded defined-contribution (DC) plans that typically contain a minimum benefit guarantee (DC-MB). Risk management techniques must be used to control the cost of these guarantees. The most common...

Terrorist attacks worldwide during the past several years have spurned an interest in understanding not only how governments can mitigate terrorism risk but also how governments might help finance future losses. This interest was buttressed by the seemingly failure of the private insurance...

This paper uses a large-scale overlapping generations model that features intragenerational heterogeneity to show that privatizing the U.S. Social Security System could be done on a progressive basis. We start with a close replica of the current system; specifically, we include Social Security's...

This paper uses a new large-scale dynamic simulation model to compare the equity, efficiency, and macroeconomic effects of five alternative to the current U.S. federal income tax. These reforms are a proportional income tax, a proportional consumption tax, a flat tax, a flat tax with transition...

The conventional wisdom dating back to Yaari (1965) is that households without a bequest motive should fully annuitize their investments. Numerous market frictions do not break this sharp result. We modify the Yaari framework by allowing a household's mortality risk itself to be stochastic....

Life insurance is a large yet poorly understood industry. A final death benefit is not paid for a majority of policies. Insurers make money on customers that lapse their policies and lose money on customers that keep their coverage. Policy loads are inverted relative to the dynamic pattern...

"Debates about the optimal structure for tax policies and tax rates hardly cease among public, policy, or academic audiences. These have only grown more heated in the United States as the gap between incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population continue to diverge. Tax...