The service sector of the world economy has grown substantially since World War II. The
worldwide insurance industry has had an average annual growth rate of over 10 percent …

The objective of this article is to propose a review of 85 empirical papers examining the
relationships between insurance and economic development, that is, the insurance‐growth …

Objections to the rational actor model in law and economics are almost as old as the field
itself. Early skeptics about the economic analysis of law were quick to marshal arguments …

Despite facing significant uncertainty about their lifespans and health care costs, most
retirees do not buy annuities or long-term care insurance. In this paper, I find that retirees' …

Even among households with similar socioeconomic characteristics, saving and wealth vary
considerably. Life-cycle models attribute this variation to differences in time preference rates …

[I] f you observe, people always live forever when there is any annuity to be paid them... An
annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting …

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full
annuitization under market completeness which are substantially less restrictive than those …

This paper uses household data to provide direct estimates of intergenerational transfers as
a source of wealth. The authors distinguish between intended transfers (for example, gifts to …

A FREQUENT THEME of policy discus-sion is the peril of the public debt. News reports
alternately sober and frantic regularly point to government debt as a major cause of …

In his best-selling Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller cautioned that society's obsession
with the stock market was fueling the volatility that has since made a roller coaster of the …