EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Longevity risk, subjective survival expectations, and individual saving behavior

Thomas Post and Katja Hanewald

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013, vol. 86, issue C, 200-220

Abstract: We provide evidence of individuals’ awareness of longevity risk (the uncertainty about future survival probabilities) based on subjective survival expectations elicited in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and matching data on longevity risk from the Human Mortality Database. We find a positive relationship between the forecast dispersion in subjective survival estimates and longevity risk which indicates that individuals are to some extent aware of longevity risk. Our analysis of savings behavior shows that the dispersion in survival estimates is primarily explained by individuals disagreeing on the survival probability and not by their true awareness of the underlying uncertainty. Individuals do not save more on average when faced with longevity risk although theory suggests they should.

Keywords: Longevity risk; Subjective survival expectations; Forecast dispersion; Saving behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D84 D91 H31 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268112002582
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Longevity Risk, Subjective Survival Expectations, and Individual Saving Behavior (2011) Downloads
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:eee:jeborg:v:86:y:2013:i:c:p:200-220

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2012.11.012

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:86:y:2013:i:c:p:200-220