Little attempt has been made so far to quantify the extent to which individual willingness to spend on life protection may account for the observed trends and diversities in agespecific life expectancies across individuals and over time. We address these issues via calibrated simulations of a dynamic, life-cycle model of life protection in which life's end is a stochastic event, age-specific mortality risks are endogenous variables, and spending on life protection is set jointly with related insurance options: life insurance as well as annuities. A unique feature of our model is that it links age-specific mortality risks and implicit private values-of-life-saving (VLS) as "dual variables", and estimates them jointly. It also offers new insights about the concept and measurement of VLS. Life protection is estimated to have a non-negligible impact on age-specific life expectancies. It can account for significant portions of observed inequalities in life expectancies across population groups and over time, as well as for a wide range of empirical estimates of VLS produced via the conventional "willingness to pay" approach.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
10759.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10759
Note: HE Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)