Joint Life Annuities and Annuity Demand by Married Couples

This paper explores the value of purchasing joint life annuities for married couples. It describes the existing market for joint life annuities, and summarizes the range of annuity products that are currently available to couples. It then considers the value that married couples would place on access to an actuarially fair annuity market, and defines a measure of willingness-to-pay for annuities. This calculation differs from the analogous one for a single individual for two reasons. First, joint-and-survivor life tables differ from individual life tables. The life expectancy of the second-to-die in a married couple is substantially greater than that for a single individual. Second, joint life annuities provide time-varying payouts, because survivor benefit options permit the payout when both members of a couple are alive to differ from that when one member has died. The paper develops a new annuity valuation model and applies it to evaluate a married couple's utility gain from annuitization. The findings suggest that previous estimates of the utility gain from annuitization, which applied to individuals, overstate the benefits of annuitization for married couples. Since most potential annuity buyers are married, these findings may help to explain the limited size of the private market for single premium annuities.

Effects of Forest Age and Composition on Coleoptera Associated with Fungal Fruiting Bodies in Southwest Ohio

Mature forests often harbor greater biodiversity than younger woods. As this relationship of forest age to biodiversity has not been examined for all taxa, this study sought to document the diversity of mycophilous beetle communities in deciduous forests of southwest Ohio and understand how they vary in relation to forest age. I surveyed fungus associated beetles using baited traps at eight forested sites in the Dayton, Ohio region. Traps were surveyed three times during 2018 to account for seasonal variation, something that has not been done for this geographic region. Forest age had no significant effect on beetle abundance or diversity, but mature forests did have a distinct community of beetles. Invasive honeysuckle had a negative effect on beetle abundance and diversity. With this information, more informed decisions may be made with regard to land use and forest management, maintaining existing mature forests and managing invasive species to enhance biodiversity

Zintl phases for thermoelectric devices

By converting waste heat into electricity and improving the efficiency of refrigeration systems, thermoelectric devices could play a significant role in solving today's energy problems. Increasing the thermoelectric efficiency (as measured by the thermoelectric material's figure-of-merit, zT) is critical to the development of this technology. Complex Zintl phases, in particular, make ideal candidates for thermoelectric materials because the necessary electron–crystal, phonon–glass properties can be engineered with an understanding of the Zintl chemistry. A recent example is the discovery that Yb14MnSb11, a transition metal Zintl compound, has twice the zT as the material currently in use at NASA. This perspective outlines a strategy to discover new high zT materials in Zintl phases, and presents results pointing towards the success of this approach

To Stage a Reading: The Actor in British Modernism

The popular British theatre of the late nineteenth century has often been regarded as both aesthetically and politically bankrupt: bombastic and spectacular, it offered a vision of sensational theatricality lacking both the formal innovation and the intellectual charge of the later avant-garde stage and of literary modernism. My dissertation, by contrast, argues that one element of the nineteenth-century stage survived and claimed a place at the heart of British modernism: the idea of the actor. In successive chapters stretching from 1897 to 1958, I take up works of fiction and drama by Bram Stoker, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, revealing how various performers of the late-Victorian stage became essential to the formation of modernist aesthetics. I show that the actor's significance lay not only in her cultural station but also in her subversive mediation of artistic convention and self-conscious reenactment of the past; by returning to the performers of the 1890s, these British and Irish writers reconceived the terms that are central to our understanding of modernism: personality, history, and tradition. As the late-Victorian stage passed out of living memory, these writers continued to invoke the actor in their treatments of the technological proliferation of text, the politics of reading during the First World War, the authority of obituary in the literary tradition, and the potential for re-writing historical progress through the lens of community theatre. Positioned between media--theatre, poetry, and the novel--and also between opposing visions of creativity and the artistic process, my research intervenes in related discussions in both theatre studies and the scholarship on modernist literature. By focusing on the art of the actor at this pivotal moment in both theatrical and literary history, I challenge the dominant assumption of an abstract anti-theatricality on the modernist stage by discussing the ambivalently "naturalistic" performance styles of Henry Irving, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Marie Lloyd, and Ellen Terry. Likewise, I argue that their art of acting reframes the key terms of literary modernism by reversing the prerogatives of textuality and the cultural practice of reading. In these ways, the actor provided a means of continually restaging the advent of modernity (and the death of the past) into the middle of the twentieth century

The Role of Real Annuities and Indexed Bonds in an Individual Accounts Retirement Program

We explore four issues concerning annuitization options that retirees might use in the decumulation phase of an individual accounts' retirement saving system. First, we investigate the operation of both real and nominal annuity individual annuity markets in the United Kingdom. The widespread availability of real annuities in the U.K. dispels the argument that private insurance markets could not, or would not, provide real annuities to retirees. Second, we consider the current structure of two inflation-linked insurance products available in the United States, only one of which proves to be a real annuity. Third, we evaluate the potential of assets such as stocks, bonds, and bills, to provide retiree protection from inflation. Because equity real returns have been high over the last seven decades, a retiree who received income linked to equity returns would have fared very well on average. Nevertheless we cast doubt on the inflation insurance' aspect of equity, since this is mainly due to stocks' high average return, and not because stock returns move in tandem with inflation. Finally, we use a simulation model to assess potential retiree willingness to pay for real, nominal, and variable payout equity-linked annuities. For plausible degrees of risk aversion, inflation protection appears to have only modest value. People would be expected to value a variable payout equity-linked annuity more highly than a real annuity because the additional real returns associated with common stocks more than compensate for the volatility of prospective payouts. These finding are germane to concerns raised in connection with Social Security reform plans that include individual accounts.

Meeting Summary: Embracing Mental Health Care: Lessons Learned for Success

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is a national organization comprising more than 62,000 members, 66 state and local chapters, 29 national committees, 49 sections, 9 councils, and staff of approximately 400. On July 28, 2011, the AAP Mental Health Initiatives hosted a preconference on “Embracing Mental Health Care: Lessons Learned for Success” in Chicago, IL. The goal was to empower pediatricians to address the health and well-being of children and youth with mental health concerns