This chapter documents the substantial decline in traditional sources of longevity insurance, and shows that published statistics on the individual annuity market greatly overstate its size and growth. It considers whether the decline in annuitization rates is cause for concern. It then...

Longevity risk transfer is a popular choice for annuity providers such as pension funds. This paper formalizes the trade-off between the cost and the risk relief of such choice, when the annuity provider uses value-at-risk to assess risk. Using first-order approximations we show that, if the...

Pensions and age specific death rates are intertwined in several ways. Pensions provide a mechanism to remove the uncertainty about date of death from consumption planning. Age specific death rates determine the cost and value of pensions. In this paper, we use the Retirement History Survey to...