On the premise that pension provision in Europe will dramatically change over the next few decades, this book concentrates on the funded component of pension wealth, and specifically on annuities - financial products that, on the basis of actuarial equivalence, allow the conversion of wealth into a lifelong stream of income. Developing an Annuity Market in Europe provides an analysis of how longevity and return risks are dealt with, besides considering key features from both household and insurance company perspectives. It takes account of the fact that annuity markets are expected to attract much interest in future years given the prospective cuts in public pension expenditure. In order to fill the gap between shrinking pensions and desired retirement consumption, the authors argue, annuities must be well regulated and supplied with financially attractive products. These conditions hardly exist today: thin markets and scant interest prevail, information is incomplete and imperfect, products show significant disparities. The contributors to this book explore the causes of present malfunctioning and examine the changes that may give annuities a new and vital function, which, along with greater competition and greater regulation may significantly alter the present scene of pension finance. Finally, the book offers an overview of regulatory issues including transparency, prudential provisions, appropriate levels of guarantees, and administrative costs. This important and timely book will be invaluable to anyone interested in annuities, from practitioners through to students, researchers and academics concerned in financial or public economics.

An introduction to economic applications of the theory of continuous-time finance that strikes a balance between mathematical rigor and economic interpretation of financial market regularities. This book introduces the economic applications of the theory of continuous-time finance, with the goal of enabling the construction of realistic models, particularly those involving incomplete markets. Indeed, most recent applications of continuous-time finance aim to capture the imperfections and dysfunctions of financial markets-characteristics that became especially apparent during the market turmoil that started in 2008. The book begins by using discrete time to illustrate the basic mechanisms and introduce such notions as completeness, redundant pricing, and no arbitrage. It develops the continuous-time analog of those mechanisms and introduces the powerful tools of stochastic calculus. Going beyond other textbooks, the book then focuses on the study of markets in which some form of incompleteness, volatility, heterogeneity, friction, or behavioral subtlety arises. After presenting solutions methods for control problems and related partial differential equations, the text examines portfolio optimization and equilibrium in incomplete markets, interest rate and fixed-income modeling, and stochastic volatility. Finally, it presents models where investors form different beliefs or suffer frictions, form habits, or have recursive utilities, studying the effects not only on optimal portfolio choices but also on equilibrium, or the price of primitive securities. The book strikes a balance between mathematical rigor and the need for economic interpretation of financial market regularities, although with an emphasis on the latter.