This paper presents new evidence on the importance of adverse selection in insurance markets. We use a unique data set, consisting of all annuity policies sold by a large U.K. insurance company since the early 1980s, to analyze mortality differences across groups of individuals who purchased...

This paper presents new evidence on the costs of purchasing private annuity contracts to spread a given stock of assets over an uncertain future lifetime. It also describes the operation of individual annuity arrangements within two large group retirement saving plans. First presents information...