خطر طول عمر، انتظارات بقا ذهنی و رفتار صرفه جویی فرد

We provide evidence of individuals’ awareness of longevity risk (the uncertainty about future survival probabilities) based on subjective survival expectations elicited in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and matching data on longevity risk from the Human Mortality Database. We find a positive relationship between the forecast dispersion in subjective survival estimates and longevity risk which indicates that individuals are to some extent aware of longevity risk. Our analysis of savings behavior shows that the dispersion in survival estimates is primarily explained by individuals disagreeing on the survival probability and not by their true awareness of the underlying uncertainty. Individuals do not save more on average when faced with longevity risk although theory suggests they should.

Over the past decades, the industrialized world has experienced rapid improvements in life expectancies and survival rates. The annual rates of these improvements exhibit variations, as illustrated in Fig. 1 for the survival rates of individuals aged 65 in five European countries. The erratic paths of the survival rates reflect the underlying complex interaction of mortality determinants such as medical innovation, nutrition habits, or environmental factors (e.g., weather and climate) whose progress and impact over time are non-deterministic. The resulting uncertainty about future survival rate improvements, that is longevity risk, adds an important systematic component to the life span uncertainty that individuals need to consider when planning their life-cycle savings.