This paper provides evidence against the hypothesis that elderly individuals with strong bequest motives purchase term life insurance to offset mandatory annuitization by the existing Social Security system. Using new data on elderly households, this study is able to examine ownership of pure term life insurance separately from whole life, or cash-value, policies. This is an important distinction in the Annuity Offset Model' because the central implication is that term insurance is purchased in order to undo' excessive government annuitization in the form of Social Security, while whole life policies among the elderly primarily consist of tax deferred savings. Evidence is presented that many households simultaneously choose to hold privately purchased annuities and term life insurance, a choice that is inconsistent with the notion that these individuals are over-annuitized. Results also indicate that the hypothesized positive relationship between term insurance ownership and Social Security benefits does not hold once one analyzes term separately from cash value policies. Previous empirical results appear to have been overly favorable to the Annuity Offset Model due to the inability to adequately account for the strong correlation between whole life insurance ownership and Social Security benefits, a correlation that can be attributed to tax-deferred savings and attempts to protect human capital during one's younger working life. Because these findings suggest that households are not seeking to undo' Social Security for bequest reasons, these results have implications for the current debate over annuitization options in an individual accounts retirement system.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
7193.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 1999 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7193
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Find related papers by JEL classification: J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions
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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.:
Michael D. Hurd & James P. Smith, 2001.
"Anticipated and Actual Bequests,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Themes in the Economics of Aging, pages 357-392
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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