Description: At retirement, people face a choice between annuitization and self-management of liquid wealth [also called self-annuitization]. A common belief is that annuitization provides longevity insurance at the cost of liquidity. This paper argues that the desire for liquidity is actually driven by bequest motives and estate value should be the measure on the liquidity of a given strategy. The authors demonstrate that self-annuitization give more estate within a critical duration [before life expectancy] while annuitization creates more estate after that. In their second result, they compute the expected ending estate at death under these two strategies and find that, on average, annuitization creates more estate than self-annuitization under reasonable assumptions. They conclude that, as long as the same fund is being used for these two strategies, annuitization and self-annuitization just create different patterns of estates over time. However, annuitization is usually better than self-annuitization for estate creation and liquidity, on average. This is somewhat counter-intuitive to popular belief because payout annuities without a certain period do not have cash surrender values. The creation of the balance stream and the results shown in this paper have important implications on new product and marketing strategies for payout annuities.

Description: The purpose of the present paper is to propose a family of sex-year-of-birth tables which may be used in place of The Annuity Table for 1940 with Projection. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1950, Vol. 2, No. 4.

Description: We devise an approach, using tobit models for modeling annuity lapse rates. The approach is based on data provided by the Society of Actuaries’ Risk Management Task Force. Kim [2005a] models annuity lapse rates using a logit model and the same US data (he also used Korean data separately). We find that the tobit model is a more than suitable approach for all levels of the explanatory variables including interest rates, unemployment rates, and GDP growth rates. Specifically, policyholder behavior in the tail of the distribution of lapse rates is explained as well as it is in the normal range of lapse rates.

Description: This paper describes a method for valuing a contingent or reversionary interest involving 2, 3, and 4 lives subject to federal tax. Tools are provided so that a person with little technical knowledge can make the determination. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1951, Vol. 3, No. 6.

Description: This paper sets out the basic principles of federal income taxation of annuity payments, together with the general rules for determining which of two possible methods must be used and the general formulas to be used. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1968, Vol. 20, Pt. 1, No. 58.

Description: The purpose of this note is to outline a rather simple technique that can be used in determining premium rates for cash refund and installment refund annuities, and in converting other forms of annuity to either of the refund forms. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1960, Vol. 12, No. 34.

Description: We give some recursive formulas involving life annuities.