This paper investigates whether exchanging the Social Security delayed retirement credit, currently paid as an increase in lifetime annuity benefits, for a lump sum would induce later claiming and additional work. We show that people would voluntarily claim about half a year later if the lump...

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...

Economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. To shed new light on this puzzle, we study payout choices in the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, where each retiree must choose between a lump sum and a life annuity. Notably, the average life annuity we study is...

We analyze the long-standing “annuity puzzle” through the lens of behavioral economics. We provide novel evidence that lessens the extent of the puzzle and shed some additional light on the real drivers of the decision to annuitize. Last, we discuss the policy implications of our findings

Some computational aspects of pension plans are discussed in the paper with applications for the pension system in the Czech Republic: (i) the gender problem for the pensions; (ii) the generation Life Tables; (iii) the problem of sustainability of the pensions in the Czech Republic. These...

National pension systems are an important part of financial intermediation and worker welfare in most countries, but how and why do they differ internationally? Controlling for important political, economic and social institutions, we document that international differences in pension...

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...

National pension systems are an important part of financial intermediation and worker welfare in most countries, but how and why do they differ internationally? Controlling for important political, economic and social institutions, we document that international differences in pension...

This paper deals with the coverage of long-term care (LTC) in Germany since the post-war period. Until the 1990s, long-term care was mainly a task of the family with means-tested, tax-financed care assistance as a last resort. In 1994, after two decades of political debate, the German parliament...

In 1982 Congress legislated a tax subsidy incentivizing the use of structured settlements. Since then the structured settlement has become a common conclusion for personal injury claims. Perhaps to the detriment of plaintiffs, it became clear early on that defendants and their liability insurers...