Annuity insurance products help protect retirees against outliving their incomes. Dramatic advances in life expectancy mean that today's retirees must plan on living into their eighties, their nineties, and even beyond. Longer life expectancies are the symbol of a prosperous society, but this progress also means that some retirees will need to plan conservatively and cut back substantially on their living standards or risk living so long that they exhaust their resources. This book examines the role that life annuities can play in helping people protect themselves against such outcomes. A life annuity is an insurance product that pays out a periodic amount for as long as the annuitant is alive, in exchange for a premium. The book begins with a history of life annuity markets during the twentieth century in the United States and elsewhere. It then explores recent trends in annuity pricing and money's worth, as well as the economic value generated for purchasers of these products. The book explains the potential importance of inflation-protected annuities and stock-market-linked variable annuities in providing more complete retirement security. The concluding chapters examine life annuities in various institutional settings and the tax treatment of annuity products.

The unprecedented rise and persistence of large-scale budget deficits in many developed and developing nations during the past three decades has caused great concern. The widespread presence of such deficits has proved difficult to explain. Their emergence in otherwise diverse nations defies particularistic explanations aimed at internal economic developments within a specific country.
"Fiscal Institutions and Fiscal Performance" shifts emphasis away from narrow economic factors to more broadly defined political and institutional factors that affect government policy and national debt. This collection brings together new theoretical models, empirical evidence, and a series of in-depth case studies to analyze the effect of political institutions, fiscal regulations, and policy decisions on accumulating deficits. It provides a fascinating overview of the political and economic issues involved and highlights the role of budgetary institutions in the formation of budget deficits.

Historically, tax policy debates - and reforms - have depended heavily on estimates of how alternative tax rules would affect household and firm behavior. Research showing that capital gains realizations were very sensitive to capital gains tax rates played an important role in the 1978 capital gains tax reform. The 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act was bolstered by studies suggesting that reductions in marginal tax rates would increase household labor supply and saving. In the early 1990s, federal tax policy debates focused on how raising marginal tax rates would affect household behavior and reported taxable income. Despite decades of interest by scholars and policy makers in the effect of tax policy on household behavior, there is still considerable controversy about the key empirical links among tax rates, household behavior, and revenue collections. The eight papers in this volume present new statistical findings on how taxes affect a range of household decisions, including labor supply, saving, choice of health insurance plan, choice of child care arrangements, portfolio choice, and tax evasion. They also present new analytical results on the effects of different types of tax policy. All of this research relies on household-level data - drawn either from public-use tax return files provided by the U.S. Treasury or from large household-level surveys - to explore various aspects of the relationship between taxes and household behavior.

Governments and corporations may chip in, but around the world household saving is the biggest factor in national saving. To better understand why saving rates differ from country to country, this volume provides the most up-to-date analyses of patterns of household saving behavior in Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each of the six chapters examines micro data sets of household saving within a particular country and summarizes statistics on patterns of saving by age, income, and other demographic factors. The authors provide age-earning profiles and analyses of the accumulation of wealth over the lifetime in a clear way that allows quick comparisons of earning, consumption, and saving in the six countries. Designed as a companion to Public Policies and Household Saving (1994), which addresses saving policies in the G-7 nations, this volume offers detailed descriptions of saving behavior in all G-7 nations except France.

The declining U.S. national saving rate has prompted economists and policymakers to ask, should the federal government encourage saving, and if so, through which policies? In order to better understand saving programs, this volume provides a systematic and detailed description of saving policies in the G-7 industrialized nations: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Among the G-7 nations, household saving rates vary dramatically. The United States and United Kingdom show personal saving rates of less than 5 percent of disposable income. The rates in France and Germany are twice as much, and in Japan and Italy personal saving rates are over 15 percent of disposable income. The United States has tried to encourage saving through programs such as IRAs and 401(k) plans, while the Japanese government has recently curtailed saving incentives. The seven articles in this volume collect and analyze extensive data on government policies affecting saving in each of the G-7 countries. Each chapter focuses on one country and addresses a core set of topics: types of accumulated household saving and debt; tax policies toward capital income; saving in the form of public and private pensions, including Social Security and similar programs; saving programs that receive special tax treatment; and saving through insurance. This detailed summary of the saving incentives of the G-7 nations will be an invaluable reference for policymakers and academics interested in personal saving behavior.