February 2018

The Optimal Allocation of Longevity Risk with Perfect Insurance Markets

By Antoine Bommier (ETH Zürich) & Hélène Schernberg (ETH Zurich) This paper discusses the allocation of aggregate longevity risk in the case of perfect insurance markets. We show that the optimal allocation transfers some risk to the pensioners, even if pension providers have access to a perfect insurance market. Individuals prefer contributions and benefits to depend on the evolution of aggregate mortality rates rather than being fixed. Indeed, this flexibility offers an interesting diversification strategy where the prospect of a...

October 2017

Longevity Risk and Capital Markets: The 2015-16 Update

By David P. Blake (The Pensions Institute), Nicole El Karoui (Ecole Polytechnique), Richard D. MacMinn (National Chengchi University) & Stéphane Loisel (University of Lyon) This Special Issue of Insurance: Mathematics and Economics contains 16 contributions to the academic literature all dealing with longevity risk and capital markets. Draft versions of the papers were presented at Longevity 11: The Eleventh International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conference that was held in Lyon, France on 8-9 September 2015. It was hosted...

February 2017

Retirement Spending and Biological Age

By Huang Huaxiong, Moshe A. Milevsky & T. S. Salisbury (York University) Abstract:     We solve a retirement lifecycle model in which the consumer's age does not move in lockstep with calendar time. Instead, biological age increases at a stochastic non-linear rate in chronological age, which one can think of as working with a clock that occasionally moves backwards in time. Our paper is inspired by the growing body of medical literature that has identified biomarkers of aging which --...

Social Security and the Rise in Health Spending

By Kai Zhao (University of Connecticut) Abstract:     In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments that the expansion of US Social Security can account for over a third of the dramatic rise in US health spending from 1950 to 2000. In addition,...