Jeffrey R. Brown

TL;DR: It is concluded that policy interventions designed to address only one factor limiting the purchase of long-term care insurance are unlikely to dramatically increase demand for long- term care insurance.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide empirical evidence on the impact that the rise of Internet comparison shopping sites has had for the prices of life insurance in the 1990s, using micro data on individual life insurance policies, the results indicate that, controlling for individual and policy characteristics, a 10 percent increase in the share of individuals in a group using the Internet reduces average insurance prices for the group by as much as 5 percent.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined how the menu of investment options made available to workers in defined contribution plans influenced portfolio choice and found that the vast majority of the new funds added to 401(k) plans are high-cost actively-managed equity funds, as opposed to lower-cost equity index funds.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the distributional implications of mandatory longevity insurance when mortality heterogeneity exists in the population and found that complete annuitization is welfare enhancing even for those with higher-than-average expected mortality rates, so long as administrative costs are sufficiently low.

TL;DR: The authors show that people have difficulty valuing annuities, and this, instead of a preference for lumpsums, helps explain observed low annuity demand, and conclude that boundedly rational consumers adopt "buy low, sell high" heuristics when confronting a complex trade-off.