Description: This study measures the share of married retirees with pension annuities who forgo survivor protection and examines the factors influencing their decisions. It also measures the share of retirees whose decisions to forgo survivor protection can be justified by its high costs or low benefits, such as the presence of other types of financial protection for the spouse, poor health of the spouse, and low income.

Description: The conventional way to analyze grouped observations on a single variable is to construct histograms or, sometimes, fit a normal distribution. We extend this latter approach by allowing for transformations to near normality.