Behavioral Obstacles to the Annuity Market

Bringing cost transparency to the life annuity market

The financial industry has recently seen a push away from structured products and towards transparency. The trend is to decompose products, such that customers understand each component as well as its price. Yet the enormous annuity market combining investment and longevity has been almost untouched by this development. We suggest a simple decomposed annuity structure that enables cost transpar...

Rare Events and Annuity Market Participation∗

We investigate whether a rare event (like the default of the annuity provider) can explain the annuity market participation puzzle. High risk aversion is needed to change behavior in the presence of such a disastrous shock but higher risk aversion also makes annuities more valuable. Therefore, these rare events are unlikely candidates to explain the low take-up of voluntary annuities. JEL Class...

Behavioral Biases in Annuity Choice: An Experiment∗

We conduct a neutral-context laboratory experiment to systematically investigate the role of the hit-by-bus concern in explaining the annuitization puzzle: the low rate of retirement-asset annuitization relative to the predictions of standard models. We vary endowed asset (annuity vs. stock of wealth vs. no explicit endowment), and find a strong endowment effect. Furthermore, we find that the o...

Obstacles to a regulated cannabis market.

The individual life-cycle, annuity market imperfections and economic growth

We study the effects of an annuity market imperfection on individual agents’ life-cycle decisions and on the macroeconomic growth rate in an overlapping generations model with single-sector endogenous growth. Our model features both age-dependent mortality and labour productivity. We model imperfect annuities by introducing a load factor on the annuity rate faced by finitely lived agents. Our m...