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Are annuities value for money?: who can afford them?

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  • Lopes, Paula

Abstract

This paper solves an empirically parameterized model of households’ optimal demand for nominal and inflation indexed annuities. The model incorporates mortality, inflation, and real interest rate risk. The model draws some interesting predictions. First, the welfare calculations on the access to annuities markets show that nominal annuities are welfare improving even when sold at the empirically parameterized cost, which is above fair value. Real annuities are welfare improving over nominal annuities when sold at a fair price, but when we incorporate the empirically parameterized annuity premium the gains become negative at all wealth levels. Second, the simulation of the model for the British population wealth distribution shows that an important explanation for the little interest in annuities comes from the fact that annuities are extremely expensive, compared with the total accumulated assets held by households. In other words many households can not afford even to enter the annuity market. The paper also compares the simulated annuity demand to the actual demands reported in the Family Resources Survey. For those individuals who buy annuities, the simulated demands are not very different from those observed in the survey.

Suggested Citation

  • Lopes, Paula, 2003. "Are annuities value for money?: who can afford them?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 24899, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:24899
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    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/24899/
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Lopes, Paula & Michaelides, Alexander, 2007. "Rare events and annuity market participation," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 82-91, June.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Annuities; Inflation risk; Real interest rate risk; Mortality risk;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

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