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Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- About This Book -- Foolish Assumptions -- Icons Used in This Book -- Beyond the Book -- Where to Go from Here -- Part 1 Making Sense of Annuities -- Chapter 1 The ABCs of Annuities -- Getting Acquainted with Annuities -- Part investment, part insurance -- Deferring taxes -- Recognizing the Most Popular Annuities -- "Savings account" annuities -- Pension-like annuities -- Options-based fixed indexed annuities -- Registered index-linked annuities -- Traditional variable annuities -- Deferred income annuities -- Age-in-place annuities (also known as reverse mortgages) -- Reasons for Exploring Annuities -- The Life Cycle of All Annuities -- The purchase stage -- The accumulation stage -- The income or distribution stage -- Chapter 2 Taming the Big Retirement Risks -- Countering the Main Risks of Retirement -- Longevity-related risks -- The risk of outliving your savings -- The risk of losing a spouse -- Health risk -- Long-term-care risk -- Investment risks -- Market risk -- Sequence-of-returns risk -- Inflation risk -- Tax risk -- Policy risk -- Planning risks -- Having no income plan at all -- Overspending -- Hoarding -- Helping out family members -- Facing a decline in cognitive ability -- Using Annuities to Buffer Retirement Risks -- Annuities for longevity risks -- Annuities for investment risks -- Annuities for planning risks -- Chapter 3 Diving into Annuity Documents -- Exploring the Annuity Application and Contract -- Signing an annuity contract -- Designating the key players -- The owner -- The annuitant -- The beneficiaries -- The issuer -- Other standard elements of annuity contracts -- Free-look periods -- Death benefits -- Surrender periods -- Single versus flexible premium -- Qualified versus nonqualified -- Annuitization options -- New or replacement annuity.

A retirement annuity allows an individual to purchase a regular payment stream from an insurance company to last his lifetime. Despite the ability of the product to eliminate the risk that a retiree will outlive his assets, few retirement annuities have been sold in the individual market. In addition, the number of individuals who annuitize their defined contribution retirement plan balances remains small. New products are emerging that would offer alternate annuity designs and make annuity prices more attractive. This report discusses legislation has been proposed in the 109th Congress that would enhance the tax treatment of annuities and encourage the growth of stand-alone annuity and combined annuity and long-term care products.

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness which are substantially less restrictive than those used by Menahem E. Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompleteness, finding that positive annuitization remains optimal widely, but complete annuitization does not. How uninsured medical expenses affect demand for illiquid annuities depends critically on the timing of the risk. A new set of calculations with optimal consumption trajectories very different from available annuity income streams still shows a preference for considerable annuitization, suggesting that limited annuity purchases are plausibly due to psychological or behavioral biases.

Annuities are financial products that guarantee the holder a fixed return so long as the holder remains alive, thereby providing insurance against lifetime uncertainty. The terms of these contracts depend on the information available to insurance firms. Unlike age and gender, information about individual survival probabilities cannot be readily ascertained. This asymmetric information causes market inefficiencies, such as adverse selection. Groundbreaking in its scope, The Economic Theory of Annuities offers readers a theoretical analysis of the functioning of private annuity markets. Starting with a general analysis of survival functions, stochastic dominance, and characterization of changes in longevity, Eytan Sheshinski derives the demand for annuities using a model of individuals who jointly choose their lifetime consumption and retirement age. The relation between life insurance and annuities that have a bequest option is examined and "annuity options" are proposed as a response to the lack of secondary markets. This book also investigates the macroeconomic policy implications of annuities and changes in longevity on aggregate savings. Sheshinski utilizes statistical population theory to shed light on the debate of whether the surge in savings and growth in Asia and other countries can be attributed to higher longevity of the population and whether this surge is durable. This book shows how understanding annuities becomes essential as governments that grapple with insolvency of public social security systems place greater emphasis on individual savings accounts