Annuity selection in the presence of insurer default risk and government guarantees
利用智利行政数据，研究个人在购买年金时是否合理评估了保险公司的违约风险，发现个人决策不受政府担保变化影响，导致年金支付不必要地降低。
Abstract We investigate whether individuals correctly assess the risk of default of annuity providers and incorporate this information into their decision‐making when purchasing an annuity. To do so, we analyze actual retirement product choices from a large administrative data set from Chile and exploit an exogenous change that decreased the coverage of government guarantees against annuity provider default. If individuals are rational and properly incorporate default risk into their decision process then, before this change, individuals should choose riskier providers that give higher annuity payments. However, we find that individuals' decisions are not influenced by changes in their protection against the risk of provider default. It seems that individuals have been unnecessarily reducing their annuity payments by not incorporating crucial information about their actual risk exposure to default when selecting annuities at retirement.