IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cje/issued/v23y1990i3p546-62.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Life-Insured Annuities: Market Failure and Policy Dilemma

Author

Listed:
  • Peter G. C. Townley

Abstract

Inasmuch as private annuity markets fail because of adverse selection, retirees would benefit if they could spend at least some of their accumulated (non-social security) wealth on publicly provided annuities. Yet governments, although capable of improving upon the competitive outcome, typically do not operate such plans. Whereas it may be impossible for a government to implement an optimal scheme because of informational constraints, other potentially welfare-enhancing compulsory and voluntary annuity plans are feasible. However, if they are ranked on both economic and political criteria, neither dominates. This dilemma may be one reason for government inertia in this area.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter G. C. Townley, 1990. "Life-Insured Annuities: Market Failure and Policy Dilemma," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 23(3), pages 546-562, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:cje:issued:v:23:y:1990:i:3:p:546-62
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0008-4085%28199008%2923%3A3%3C546%3ALAMFAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z
    Download Restriction: only available to JSTOR subscribers
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:dau:papers:123456789/5369 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Power, Simon & Townley, Peter G. C., 2001. "Is there a role for government intervention in the annuity market?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 469-472, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cje:issued:v:23:y:1990:i:3:p:546-62. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Prof. Werner Antweiler (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ceaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.