Voting the Gender Gap or The Role of Annuity Markets in Financing Retirement

Voting the Gender Gap

Author: Lois Duke Whitaker

This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. The contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates. Voting the Gender Gap analyzes trends in voting while probing how women's political empowerment and gender affect American politics and the electoral process.



Contributors are Susan J. Carroll, Erin Cassese, Cal Clark, Janet M. Clark, M. Margaret Conway, Kathleen A. Dolan, Laurel Elder, Kathleen A. Frankovic, Steven Greene, Leonie Huddy, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Barbara Norrander, Margie Omero, and Lois Duke Whitaker.

Interesting book: Tear up This Book or Can You See What I See The Night Before Christmas

The Role of Annuity Markets in Financing Retirement

Author: Jeffrey R Brown

Dramatic advances in life expectancy mean that today's retirees must plan on living into their eighties, their nineties, and even beyond. Longer life expectancies are the symbol of a prosperous society, but this progress also means that some retirees will need to plan conservatively and cut back substantially on their living standards or risk living so long that they exhaust their resources. This book examines the role that life annuities can play in helping people protect themselves against such outcomes.

A life annuity is an insurance product that pays out a periodic amount for as long as the annuitant is alive, in exchange for a premium. The book begins with a history of life annuity markets during the twentieth century in the United States and elsewhere. It then explores recent trends in annuity pricing and money's worth, as well as the economic value generated for purchasers of these products. The book explains the potential importance of inflation-protected annuities and stock-market-linked variable annuities in providing more complete retirement security. The concluding chapters examine life annuities in various institutional settings and the tax treatment of annuity products.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction and Overview	1
2	A Brief History of Annuity Markets	23
3	Private Annuity Markets in the United States: 1919-1984	57
4	New Evidence on the Money's Worth of Individual Annuities	71
5	The Role of Real Annuities and Indexed Bonds in an Individual Accounts Retirement Program	107
6	The Costs of Annuitizing Retirement Payouts from Individual Accounts	153
7	Taxing Retirement Income: Nonqualified Annuities and Distributions from Qualified Accounts	185
	Index	227