This paper analyzes the savings and longevity impacts of mortality‐contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life insurance programs, as well as the rapid increase in the life expectancy of older ages, motivates a better understanding of the incentive effects that mortality‐contingent claims have on longevity‐related behavior. We claim that these incentives in often alter the standard conclusions obtained about old‐age support when mortality is treated exogenously. In particular, we argue that annuities involve moral hazard effects that increase longevity and, among other things, introduce a positive interaction between public programs for health care and income support for the elderly‐programs that have grown enormously in developed countries

This paper concerns inferring how self-interested subjects, as opposed to altruistic investigators, evaluate treatments in social experiments. The authors argue that the attrition behavior of subjects reveals their evaluation and discuss the usefulness of using such data in performing subject-based evaluation. The authors study the causes of disagreements between investigators and subjects in evaluating treatments and empirically assess the degree to which they disagree. The paper provides an empirical framework for estimating the systematic level of disagreement in the presence of such errors. Using clinical trials, the authors find substantial evidence of overapproval by investigators in about one-third of the trials analyzed.