Survival Ambiguity and Welfare

Frank Caliendo, Aspen Gorry and Sita Slavov

No 23648, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Nearly all life-cycle models adopt Yaari's (1965) assumption that individuals know the survival probabilities that they face. Given that an individual's exact survival probabilities are likely unknown, we explore the implications of relaxing this assumption. If there is no annuity market, then the welfare cost of survival ambiguity is large and regressive. Individuals would pay as much as 1% of total lifetime consumption for immediate resolution of ambiguity and the bottom income quintile is 4 times worse off than the top quintile. Alternatively, with the availability of competitive annuity contracts, survival ambiguity is welfare improving because it allows competitive insurance companies to pool risk across survival types. Even though Social Security and annuities share some properties, Social Security does not help to hedge survival ambiguity.

JEL-codes: D80 D91 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias and nep-upt
Note: AG PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Frank N. Caliendo & Aspen Gorry & Sita Slavov, 2019. "Survival ambiguity and welfare," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23648.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Survival ambiguity and welfare (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23648

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23648

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().