The Future of Old-Age Longevity : Competitive Pricing of Mortality Contingent Claims.

The future course of old-age mortality is of great importance to public sector expenditures in countries where old-age programs, such as Social Security and Medicare in the US, account for large fractions of the public budget. This paper argues that the competitive market prices of motality contingent claims, such as annuities and life-insurance, contain information which allow one to infer the opinion of the market regarding the pace of the continued increase in olf-age longevity.