Redistribution by insurance market regulation: Analyzing a ban on gender-based retirement annuities

Abstract

We focus on “selection markets,” which cover markets in which consumers vary not only in how much they are willing to pay for a product but also in how costly they are to the seller. The chapter tries to organize the recent wave of IO-related papers on selection markets, which has largely focused on insurance and credit markets. We provide a common framework, terminology, and notation that can be used to understand many of these papers, and that we hope can be usefully applied going forward.