Despite a general reduction in poverty among the aged, roughly one third of elderly nonmarried women are officially poor. Many of these women are widows.The fact that poverty rates are significantly larger for widows than for married women suggests that many households may fail to buy sufficient life insurance.This paper considers the adequacy and determinants of life insurance among the elderly. Its principal conclusions are:(1) Combined private and public life insurance is inadequate for a significant minority of elderly households;(2) Of those elderly households in which the husband's future income representsa significant fraction of total household resources, roughly half are inadequately insured;(3) Households do not significantly offset Social Security's provision of survivor insurance by reducing their private purchase of life insurance; and(4) The actual determinants of the purchase of life insurance appear to differ greatly from those predicted by economic theory.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
1737.
Length: Date of creation: May 1987 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1737
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Kotlikoff, Laurence J & Spivak, Avia & Summers, Lawrence H, 1982.
"The Adequacy of Savings,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 72(5), pages 1056-69, December.
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Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Lawrence H. Summers, 1981.
"The Adequacy of Savings,"
NBER Working Papers
0627, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Thomas Davidoff & Jeffrey R. Brown & Peter A. Diamond, 2005.
"Annuities and Individual Welfare,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 95(5), pages 1573-1590, December.
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