This paper analyzes the costs of third-pillar individual pension plans currently available in Italy, namely pension insurance policies and open pension funds, which are new products in the Italian savings market. For lack of data on annuities, the analysis is limited to the accumulation phase....

A well-known result in life-cycle models with uncertain lifetime is that, absent other sources of uncertainty, egoistic agents should annuitize all their wealth. The gain from access to an annuity market, as measured by the increase in non-annuitized wealth required to obtain the same utility...