The determinants of mortality heterogeneity and implications for pricing underwritten annuities

This makes standard annuities expensive for many individuals. To address this issue there has been a shift to underwriting annuities in order to offer lower prices to individuals with below-average longevity. While underwriting reduces heterogeneity, mortality risk still varies within each risk class due to unobservable individual-specific factors, referred to as frailty. This paper quantities the financial impact of frailty on underwritten annuities. The heterogeneity implied by underwriting factors and frailty is quantitied by fitting Generalized Linear Mixed Models to longitudinal data for a large sample of US males. The results show that heterogeneity remains after underwriting, creating signicant variation in the fair value of underwritten annuities. We develop a method to adjust annuity prices to allow for frailty.