Defined terms for the annuity market and lifetime income landscape.
A period certain annuity is an arrangement under which the insurer makes scheduled income payments for a contractually specified fixed period, with payments continuing for the full period regardless of whether the contract owner survives, and ceasing at the end of the period.
A period life table is a mortality table constructed from mortality rates observed across all ages within a single calendar year or short window, treating those rates as the mortality experience of a hypothetical cohort that lives entirely under that period's conditions.
Persistency is the percentage of annuity contracts in a given cohort that remain in force through a given period, expressed as the complement of lapse rate and used in pricing, reserving, and asset-liability management to characterize how durable a block of business is over time.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index is the Bureau of Economic Analysis' measure of price change for goods and services consumed by US households; it is preferred by the Federal Reserve for policy and differs from the Consumer Price Index in basket composition and chain-weighting.
