What Makes Annuitization More Appealing?

Annuity and lump-sum decisions in defined benefit plans: the role of plan rules.

Amidst growing concerns about workers outliving their retirement savings, a key question-both as a matter of national retirement policy and understanding the potential role of plan design and education in influencing individual decision-making-is how many retiring workers actually choose to annuitize (to take a stream of lifetime income) vs. opting for a lump-sum payment. The key finding of thi...

Reflections on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationshi...

Polymeric Gas Separation Membranes: What Makes them Industrially more Attractive?

On the sub-optimality cost of immediate annuitization in DC pension funds

We consider the position of a member of a defined contribution (DC) pension scheme having the possibility of taking programmed withdrawals at retirement. According to this option, she can defer annuitization of her fund to a propitious future time, that can be found to be optimal according to some criteria. This option, that adds remarkable flexibility in the choice of pension benefits, is not ...

The Annuitization of Americans ' Resources : a Cohort Analysis

This paper constructs a unique cohort data set to study the changes since 1960 in the share of Americans' resources that are annuitized. Understanding these changes is important because the larger this share, the more cohorts are likely to consume and the less they are likely to bequeath. Hence, the degree of annuitization affects national saving as well as the transmission of inequality over t...