Private Annuity Research Articles

Lifecycle Impacts of the Financial and Economic Crisis on Household Optimal Consumption, Portfolio Choice, and Labor Supply

The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and reduced labor earnings, which reduced household contributions to Social Security and some private pensions. Our research asks which types of individuals were most affected by these dual financial and economic shocks, and it also explores how people may react by changing their consumption, saving and investment, work and retirement, and annuitization decisions. We do so with a realistically calibrated lifecycle framework allowing for time-varying investment opportunities and countercyclical risky labor income dynamics. We show that households near retirement will reduce both short- and long-term consumption, boost work effort, and defer retirement. Younger cohorts will initially reduce their work hours, consumption, saving, and equity exposure; later in life, they will work more, retire later, consume less, invest more in stocks, save more, and reduce their demand for private annuities.

Lifecycle Impacts of the Financial and Economic Crisis on Household Optimal Consumption, Portfolio Choice, and Labor Supply

The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and reduced labor earnings, which reduced household contributions to Social Security and some private pensions. Our research asks which types of individuals were most affected by these dual financial and economic shocks, and it also explores how people may react by changing their consumption, saving and investment, work and retirement, and annuitization decisions. We do so with a realistically calibrated lifecycle framework allowing for time-varying investment opportunities and countercyclical risky labor income dynamics. We show that households near retirement will reduce both short- and long-term consumption, boost work effort, and defer retirement. Younger cohorts will initially reduce their work hours, consumption, saving, and equity exposure; later in life, they will work more, retire later, consume less, invest more in stocks, save more, and reduce their demand for private annuities.

私的年金についての若干の補足:年金の動向ノート (4)

私的年金についての若干の補足:年金の動向ノート (4)

ENDOGENOUS HEALTH CARE, LIFE EXPECTANCY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

We study the endogenous relationship between health care, life expectancy and output in a neoclassical growth model. Although health care directly diverts resources away from goods production, it prolongs life expectancy, which in turn leads to higher savings and, hence, capital formation through a private annuity market. We show that savings and health care are complements in equilibrium, with both rising with economic development. Our model is therefore consistent with several observed stylized development patterns across countries. Moreover, through the longevity-enhancing channel, health care and health production technology are found by simulation to be growth and welfare promoting.

Collective Annuities and Redistribution

AbstractThis paper studies the role of alternative pension systems that offer collective annuities. The defining characteristic of collective annuities is that they do not depend on an individual's survival probabilities. We show that such a system may be welfare improving (with a utilitarian social welfare function) even when private annuity markets are perfect and when life expectancy and earning abilities are positively correlated (i.e., in a setting that is a priori biased against collective annuities). We first concentrate on linear pension systems and contrast two schemes: a pure contributory (Bismarckian) pension and a flat rate (Beveridgean) pension. We show that the case for collective annuities is stronger when they are associated with a flat pension system. Then we analyze nonlinear pension schemes. We show that the solution can be implemented by a pension scheme associated with annuities that reflect some degree of “collectiveness.” Unlike under pure collective annuities, benefits do depend on life expectancy but to a lesser degree than with actuarially fair private annuities. In other words, the impact of survival probabilities is mitigated rather than completely neutralized.

Family Deferred Payment Sales: Installment Sales, SCINs, Private Annuity Sales, OID and Other Enigmas

Although this article is more than fifteen years old, in light of the recent Tax Court Memorandum Decision in Est. of Angle, v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2009-227 and earlier proposed regulations, Proposed Rules (REG-141901-05) On Tax Treatment of Exchanges of Appreciated Properties for Annuities, that are still pending, it may still be worth consulting. The issues of the proper relationship between the major types of deferred payment sales, particularly in families, that include installment sales that may include, contingent as well as fixed payments, private annuities, that are usually measured by the seller's' life, and a hybrid known as the self-cancelling installment note, which involves an installment sale that provides that payments terminate usually on the seller's death (SCINs) create tax planning issues and problems discussed in the article, but also tax policy issues because of the complex different application of the rules relating to original issue discount (OID) and the regulations relating to contingent payment sales. Many of these issues are also explored in Comment of the Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section of the American Bar Association on REG-141901-05 (Exchanges of Property for an Annuity) (Jan.16, 2007), 2007 TNT 217-19, on which the authors participated.

Annuitized Wealth and Consumption at Older Ages

The growing popularity of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and defined contribution (DC) pension plans, which generally provide benefits in the form of lump sum payments instead of annuities, is likely to affect spending patterns at older ages. People who enter retirement with little of their wealth annuitized run the risk of spending too quickly and depleting their assets before they die. Or they might spend too slowly, out of fear of running out of money, and not enjoy as comfortable a retirement as they could afford. This study uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), including a recent supplemental expenditure survey, to examine how household expenditures among adults ages 65 and older vary by the degree of annuitization-where annuities include Social Security benefits, pensions and private annuity contracts, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Results indicate that typical older married adults hold 55 percent of their retirement wealth in annuitized assets, and unmarried adults have 59 percent of their wealth annuitized. Older adults with little annuitized wealth spend more, even controlling for demographics, income, and wealth. If all defined benefit pensions (DB) were converted into unannuitized DC retirement accounts, discretionary spending could increase by as much as 3 percent for married adults and 11 percent for unmarried adults. By comparison, if Social Security was completely privatized, and retirees did not annuitize, discretionary spending could increase by as much as 22 percent for married adults and 38 percent for unmarried adults.

Demographic Uncertainty and Welfare in a Life-Cycle Model Under Alternative Public Pension Systems

In this paper, I analyze consumption, aggregate savings,output and welfare implications of …ve dierent social security arragements whenever there is demographic uncertanity. Following Bohn(2002), I analyze the eect of an uncetain population growth in an extended version of a modi…ed Life-cycle model developed by Gertler(1999). Population growth dampens savings and output under all arrangements. Pay-as-you-go-De…ned Bene…t system appears to fare better than all other alternatives, falling short of the private annuity market with no pension system. But social security in general increases social welfare, with Fully Funded systems faring the best. Thus there appears to be a clear tradeobewteen growth and social welfare. The social security system also reduces the volatility of the economy.

Social Security Privatization with Income-Mortality Correlation

While privatizing Social Security can improve labor supply incentives, it can also reduce risk sharing. We simulate a 50-percent privatization using an overlapping-generations model where heterogeneous agents with elastic labor supply face idiosyncratic earnings shocks and longevity uncertainty. When wage shocks are insurable, privatization produces about $30,100 of extra resources for each future household after all transitional losses have been paid. When wages are not insurable, privatization reduces efficiency by about $8,100 per future household. We check the robustness of these results to different model specifications as well as policy reforms and arrive at several surprising conclusions. First, privatization performs better in a closed economy, where interest rates decline with capital accumulation, than in an open economy. Second, privatization also performs better when an actuarially-fair private annuity market does not exist. Third, government matching of private contributions on a progressive basis is not very effective at restoring efficiency and can actually harm.

Does Social Security Privatization Produce Efficiency Gains?

While privatizing Social Security can improve labor supply incentives, it can also reduce risk sharing when households face uninsurable risks. We simulate a stylized 50-percent privatization using an overlapping-generations model where heterogeneous agents with elastic labor supply face idiosyncratic earnings shocks and longevity uncertainty. When wage shocks are insurable, privatization produces about $21,900 of new resources for each future household (growth adjusted over time) after all households have been fully compensated for their possible transitional losses. However, when wages are not insurable, privatization reduces efficiency by about $5,600 per future household despite improved labor supply incentives. We check the robustness of these results to different model specifications and arrive at several surprising conclusions. First, privatization actually performs relatively better in a closed economy, where interest rates decline with capital accumulation, than in an open economy where capital can be accumulated without reducing interest rates. Second, privatization also performs relatively better when an actuarially-fair private annuity market does not exist than when it does exist. Third, introducing progressivity into the privatized system to restore risk sharing must be done carefully. In particular, having the government match private contributions on a progressive basis is not very effective at restoring risk-sharing - too much matching actually harms efficiency. However, increasing the progressivity of the remaining traditional system is very effective at restoring risk sharing, thereby allowing partial privatization to produce efficiency gains of $2,700 per future household.

Government-provided annuities under insolvency risk

This paper seeks to determine whether governments should intervene in the private annuity market by directly providing public insurance in the form of annuities when both the government and the insurance companies could default. It is found that, although the government could default, intervening by means of an annuity can improve social welfare if the insurance companies could default and the expected return on the public annuity is greater than the rate of return on a risk-free bond. We also find that, under actuarially fair pricing, the government should provide more in terms of a public annuity than the optimal amount of the annuity that the individual purchases in the private market if the government is less likely to default on the public annuity than an insurance company would in the case of a private annuity.

Crowd-Out, Adverse Selection and Information in Annuity Markets: Evidence from a New Retrospective Data Set in Chile

Annuitization is often considered a socially desirable payout mode from pension plans, because it provides a lifelong income stream and therefore ensures that retirees will not run out of money. However, annuitization is rare in most countries. This project examines workers' choices during the payout stage in Chile, the only country that has had mandatory personal accounts long enough to have had substantial experience with payouts. Upon retirement, workers in Chile have limited options for payouts: they must either annuitize or take gradual withdrawal. Two-thirds have annuitized. We expect that retirees are less likely to annuitize if their accumulation finances a pension in the vicinity of the minimum pension, whose value is guaranteed by the state. In that case, publicly-financed longevity insurance is likely to crowd out private annuity insurance. We expect that retirees with health problems are also less likely to annuitize, possibly leading to adverse selection. Finally, we expect that individuals with greater risk aversion, smaller time preference and better knowledge about the system are more likely to annuitize. A new retrospective data set from Chile yields evidence that is broadly consistent with these hypotheses.

Adverse selection in the annuity market with sequential and simultaneous insurance demand

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection on the private annuity market in a model with two periods of retirement and two types of individuals, who differ in their life expectancy. In order to introduce the existence of time-limited pension insurance, we consider a model where for each period of retirement separate contracts can be purchased. Demand for the two periods can be decided sequentially or simultaneously. We show that only a situation where all risk types choose sequential contracts is an equilibrium and that this outcome is favourable for the long-living, but is unfavourable for the short-living individuals.

The Political Economy of Government‐Issued Longevity Bonds

AbstractThis article explores the trade‐offs associated with government issuance of longevity bonds as a way of stimulating private annuity supply in the presence of aggregate mortality risk. We provide new calculations suggesting a 5 percent chance that aggregate mortality risk could ex post raise annuity costs for private insurers by as much as 5–10 percentage points, with the most likely effect based on historical patterns toward the lower end of that range. While we suspect that aggregate mortality risk does exert some upward pressure on annuity prices, evidence from private market pricing suggests that, to the extent that private insurers are accurately pricing this risk, the effect is less than 5 percentage points. We discuss ways that the private market can spread this risk, while emphasizing that the government has the unique ability to spread aggregate risk across generations. We note factors that might hamper such an efficient allocation of risk, including potential political incentives for the government to shift more than the optimal amount of risk onto future generations, and the possibility that government fiscal policy might allocate risk less efficiently within each generation than would private markets. We also discuss how large‐scale longevity bond issuance might affect government borrowing costs, as well as political economy aspects of how the proceeds from such a bond issuance might be used.

Demand and adverse selection in a pooled annuity fund

In this paper, we construct a model for examining the demand for annuities together with the possible implications of adverse selection when an individual consumer has access to both a private annuity market and a market with a pooled annuity fund. An earlier paper by Piggott et al. [Piggott, J., Valdez, E.A., Detzel, B., 2005. The simple analytics of a pooled annuity fund. J. Risk Insur. 72, 497–520] provides a formal analysis of the payout adjustments from a longevity risk-pooling fund, an arrangement referred to in the paper as Group Self Annuitization (GSA). In such a pooled arrangement, the annuitants will bear their own cohorts’ systematic risk, but the cohort will share the idiosyncratic risk. The resulting return on the pooled annuity fund can be expressed as the product of a return from an ordinary annuity multiplied by a random variable that accounts for the adjustment that is due to deviations from expectation of mortality and investments. As demonstrated in this paper, a simple analysis of economic choice provides that it is possible to reduce the implications of adverse selection in a pooled annuity fund. It is well-documented that empirically, individuals do not find private annuity funds an attractive form of investment despite the potential welfare benefits that can be drawn from annuitization. A pooled annuity fund is an alternative to the conventional private annuity fund that may be considered more cost-effective.

Annuitized Wealth and Consumption at Older Ages

The growing popularity of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and defined contribution (DC) pension plans, which generally provide benefits in the form of lump sum payments instead of annuities, is likely to affect spending patterns at older ages. People who enter retirement with little of their wealth annuitized run the risk of spending too quickly and depleting their assets before they die. Or they might spend too slowly, out of fear of running out of money, and not enjoy as comfortable a retirement as they could afford. This study uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), including a recent supplemental expenditure survey, to examine how household expenditures among adults ages 65 and older vary by the degree of annuitization—where annuities include Social Security benefits, pensions and private annuity contracts, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Results indicate that typical older married adults hold 55 percent of their retirement wealth in annuitized assets, and unmarried adults have 59 percent of their wealth annuitized. Older adults with little annuitized wealth spend more, even controlling for demographics, income, and wealth. If all defined benefit pensions (DB) were converted into unannuitized DC retirement accounts, discretionary spending could increase by as much as 3 percent for married adults and 11 percent for unmarried adults. By comparison, if Social Security was completely privatized, and retirees did not annuitize, discretionary spending could increase by as much as 22 percent for married adults and 38 percent for unmarried adults.

Does Social Security Privatization Produce Efficiency Gains?

While privatizing social security can improve labor supply incentives, it can also reduce risk sharing. We analyze a 50% privatization using an overlapping-generations model where heterogeneous agents with elastic labor supply face idiosyncratic earnings shocks and longevity uncertainty. When wage shocks are insurable, privatization produces about $18,100 of extra resources for each future household after all transitional losses have been compensated for with lump-sum taxes. When wages are not insurable, privatization reduces efficiency by about $2,400 per future household. We check the robustness of these results to different model specifications as well as policy reforms and arrive at several surprising conclusions. First, privatization performs better in a closed economy, where interest rates decline with capital accumulation, than in an open economy. Second, privatization also performs better when an actuarially fair private annuity market does not exist. Third, government matching of private contributions on a progressive basis is not very effective at restoring efficiency and can actually cause harm.

Is Increasing Hedge Fund After-Tax Returns Using Private Placement Life Insurance and Annuities Still Viable?

The authors start with a brief reminder of the changes experienced in the hedge fund industry over the last 25 years to focus on a feature that has barely changed: hedge funds are typically tax-inefficient. They then review the main benefits associated with the use of variable life insurance or annuity policies and point to the fact that these benefits go beyond tax-efficiency. They conclude that, although hedge fund life insurance and annuities are not for everyone, in the right circumstances, they can provide very significant benefits to both policyholder investors and hedge fund managers. Recent developments have restricted some forms of hedge fund life insurance and annuities, but have not limited the very significant tax advantages of properly structured policies.

Can the Private Annuity Market Provide Secure Retirement Income?

Annuity premiums are often assumed to be constant, although they can be expected to vary with the yield curve. Variations in premiums will become an important public policy issue as defined-contribution (DC) pension plans play an increasingly prominent role in providing retirement income. As DC plan holders retire, many will annuitize at least a part of their account balances. In the absence of current data on annuity prices, the paper relies on U.S. Treasury interest rate data to simulate the impact of interest rate variation on annuity premiums. For a spectrum of feasible interest rates, the variation in retirement income is not negligible.

Can the Private Annuity Market Provide Secure Retirement Income?

Annuity premiums are often assumed to be constant, although they can be expected to vary with the yield curve. Variations in premiums will become an important public policy issue as defined-contribution (DC) pension plans play an increasingly prominent role in providing retirement income. As DC plan holders retire, many will annuitize at least a part of their account balances. In the absence of current data on annuity prices, the paper relies on U.S. Treasury interest rate data to simulate the impact of interest rate variation on annuity premiums. For a spectrum of feasible interest rates, the variation in retirement income is not negligible.