Managing retirement wealth is one of the major financial decisions that individuals face. In this setting, I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock...

Using a novel dataset with over 100,000 actual payout decisions, we investigate the nature of the strong negative relationship between recent stock returns and the annuitization of retirement savings. After controlling for several standard explanations (e.g., wealth effects), we present evidence...

I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock market returns decrease the likelihood of employees choosing an annuity over a lump sum, and vice versa. More...