A recent US Treasury regulation allowed deferred longevity income annuities to be included in pension plan menus as a default payout solution, yet little research has investigated whether more people should convert some of the $15 trillion they hold in employer-based defined contribution plans...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

This paper investigates how loss-aversion affects individuals' decisions on savings and insurance purchase. Specifically, this paper empirically tests if prospect theory's loss aversion decreases insurance demand and increases savings demand. Prospect theory predicts that boundedly rational...

This study uses the most recent wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine participation of aging households in the long-term care insurance market. Results suggest that households who perceived a need to move to a nursing home within the next five years and households with higher...

This paper brings together the academic literature on individual and institutional investors in order to understand the nature of difficulties faced by them and set the background for the Special Issue. This introductory article and the papers in the Special Issue contribute to the debate on how...

The paper constructs a model of optimal portfolio allocation that focuses on the role of housing as collateral, allows for house price risk, and assumes that altering the quantity of housing incurs an adjustment cost. Because of the adjustment cost, the current house value becomes a state...

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

We employ recent Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) microdata from the US to analyze the impacts of confidence in one's own financial knowledge, confidence in the economy, and objective financial literacy on investment in risky financial assets (equity and bonds) on both the extensive and...

In view of the increasing intensity of terrorism worldwide, behavioral changes of households become visible. People tend to overvalue terror-related risks such that the subjective probability of terrorism events. Using microeconomic panel data of the elderly population from 13 European...

1. This research examines the potential impact of the stock market crash of 2008-2009 on U.S. working households. The Great Recession caused financial problems for many households in terms of unemployment, business losses, and decreases in real estate values, but the broadly based decreases in...