Survival Pessimism and the Demand for Annuities

This work was funded by the IFS Retirement Savings Consortium. The group comprised Age UK, Association of British Insurers, Chartered Insurance Institute, Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs, HM Treasury, Investment Association, Legal and General Investment Management, Money Advice Service, and Tax Incentivised Savings Association. We are grateful to representatives from these groups for comments. Co-funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (through a Knowledge Exchange Grant, through grants ES/N011872/1, ES/P001831/1 and through the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) (grant reference ES/M010147/1)) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Joseph Altonji, James Banks, Jochem de Bresser, Agar Brugiavini, Rowena Crawford, Carl Emmerson, Eric French, Costas Meghir, John Eric Humphries, Gemma Tetlow, Lindsey Uniat, Guglielmo Weber, Ebonya Washington and Basit Zafar for helpful conversations. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.