Annuity Markets and Retirement Security

* James M. Poterba is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Poterba is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Director of the NBER's Public Economics Research Program. The research reported herein was supported in part by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College pursuant to a grant from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) funded as part of the Retirement Research Consortium. The opinions and conclusions are solely those of the author and should not be construed as representing the opinions or policy of SSA or any agency of the federal government or of the CRR. I am grateful to Jeff Brown and Michael Orszag for helpful discussions, especially to Amy Finkelstein for many helpful discussions and for outstanding research assistance, and to the Hoover Institution and National Science Foundation for additional research support. This paper is based upon a lecture delivered at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in July 2000.