How much credit can be given to entrepreneurship for the unprecedented innovation and growth of free-enterprise economies? In this book, some of the world's leading economists tackle this difficult and understudied question, and their responses shed new light on how free-market economies work--and what policies most encourage their growth.

The contributors take as their starting point William J. Baumol's 2002 book The Free-Market Innovation Machine (Princeton), which argued that independent entrepreneurs are far more important to growth than economists have traditionally...

Annuities are financial products that guarantee the holder a fixed return so long as the holder remains alive, thereby providing insurance against lifetime uncertainty. The terms of these contracts depend on the information available to insurance firms. Unlike age and gender, information about individual survival probabilities cannot be readily ascertained. This asymmetric information causes market inefficiencies, such as adverse selection.

Groundbreaking in its scope, The Economic Theory of Annuities offers readers a theoretical analysis of the functioning of private annuity...