This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people's ability to value a life-time income stream or annuity, drawing on a survey of about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. By experimentally varying the degree of complexity, we provide the first causal evidence...

This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people's ability to value a lifetime income stream or annuity, drawing on a survey of about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. By experimentally varying the degree of complexity, we provide the first causal evidence...

This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people's ability to value a life-time income stream or annuity, drawing on a survey of about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. By experimentally varying the degree of complexity, we provide the first causal evidence...

This paper investigates consumers' difficulty in valuing life annuities. Using a survey-based experiment, we show that the prices at which people are willing to buy annuities are substantially below the prices at which they are willing to sell them. This finding is not a simple endowment effect,...

Beginning in September 2003, the Retirement Research Center at the National Bureau of Economic Research conducted a coordinated series of investigations on Social Security in an environment of continually changing demographics, health trends, longevity, labor markets, economic conditions, and...

This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people's ability to value a life-time income stream or annuity, drawing on a survey of about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. By experimentally varying the degree of complexity, we provide the first causal evidence...

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness that are substantially less restrictive than those used by Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompleteness, finding that positive annuitization remains...

This paper provides an independent review and evaluation of the PBGC's Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS). Our analysis suggests that the PIMS model was, in many ways, “state-of-the-art” when it was created approximately two decades ago. However, several key components of the model...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...