Life Insurance Retirement Plans (LIRPs) offer tax-deferred cash value accumulation, tax-free withdrawals (if properly structured), and a tax-free death benefit to beneficiaries. Thus, LIRPs share many of the tax advantages of other retirement savings vehicles but with less restrictive...

In this paper, we first provide a brief exposition of the simplest version of the selfish life cycle model or hypothesis, which is undoubtedly the most widely used theoretical model of household behavior in economics, and then survey the literature on household saving behavior in Japan (with...

The social security program now provides a constant real benefit throughout each retirees lifetime. This paper examines whether total welfare would rise if benefits were lower in early retirement years (when most individuals have some saving with which to finance consumption) and higher in later...

Households hold vastly heterogenous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and...