Tag: annuities

A glass jar full of coins and plant growing through it with some coins and plant leaves.

Introduction Immediate annuities provide insurance against outliving one’s wealth.  Previous research has shown that this insurance ought to be valuable to risk-averse households facing an uncertain lifespan.  But rates of voluntary annuitization remain extremely low.  Many explanations have been offered for retired households’ reluctance to annuitize.  One prominent explanation is that annuities suffer from a…

A glass jar full of coins and plant growing through it with some coins and plant leaves.

Abstract This paper advances the theory of annuity demand. First, we derive sufficient conditions under which complete annuitization is optimal, showing that this well-known result holds true in a more general setting than in Yaari (1965). Specifically, when markets are complete, sufficient conditions need not impose exponential discounting, intertemporal separability or the expected utility axioms…