The Calculus of Retirement Income Financial Models for Pension Annuities and Life Insurance

This 2006 book introduces and develops the basic actuarial models and underlying pricing of life-contingent pension annuities and life insurance from a unique financial perspective. The ideas and techniques are then applied to the real-world problem of generating sustainable retirement income towards the end of the human life-cycle. The role of lifetime income, longevity insurance, and systematic withdrawal plans are investigated in a parsimonious framework. The underlying technology and terminology of the book are based on continuous-time financial economics by merging analytic laws of mortality with the dynamics of equity markets and interest rates. Nonetheless, the book requires a minimal background in mathematics and emphasizes applications and examples more than proofs and theorems. It can serve as an ideal textbook for an applied course on wealth management and retirement planning in addition to being a reference for quantitatively-inclined financial planners.

Preface; Part I. Models of Actuarial Finance: 1. Introduction and motivation; 2. Modeling the human life-cycle; 3. Models of human mortality; 4. Valuation models of deterministic interest; 5. Models of risky financial investments; 6. Models of pension life annuities; 7. Models of life insurance; 8. Models of DB vs. DC pensions; Part II. Wealth Management Applications and Implications: 9. Sustainable spending at retirement; 10. Longevity insurance revisited; Part III. Advanced Topics: 11. Options within variable annuities; 12. The utility of annuitization; 13. Book conclusions; Appendices.

Moshe A. Milevsky is Associate Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Buisness at York University and the Executive Director of the IFID Centre in Toronto, Canada. He was elected as a Fellow of the Fields Institute in 2002. Professor Milevsky is co-founding editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, published by Cambridge University Press, and has published more than thirty scholarly articles in addition to three books. His popular media writing received a National Magazine Award in Canada in 2004. He has lectured widely on the topic of retirement income planning, insurance and investments in North America, South America and Europe, and is a frequent guest on North American television and radio.