17th Century Perspective Earns Prestigious Book Award

Moshe A. Milevsky Professor of Finance
Moshe A. Milevsky

The American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA) recently announced that Professor Moshe A. Milevsky’s book King William’s Tontine: Why the Retirement Annuity of the Future Should Resemble Its Past has been selected to receive the 2017 Kulp-Wright Book Award.

The Kulp-Wright Award is presented annually by ARIA – the premier association of researchers in insurance – to the book considered to be the most influential, published during the prior year on the subjects of risk management and insurance. The award has been granted annually since 1944 and Milevsky joins a prestigious list of prior winners.

“This honour shows that tontine thinking, in the design of personal risk management products, is a concept with a high likelihood of catching-on in both academia and industry,” Professor Milevsky said. “It also proves that there are valuable lessons to be learned from 17th century financial and insurance history, even in the rapidly changing 21st century.”

The award will be presented at the annual ARIA conference which takes place in Toronto this August. The accolade comes on the heels of recent media and publicity for Professor Milevsky’s research on tontines and the history of financial retirement products; profiled in the Economist Magazine in June and The New York Times in April. Professor Milevsky is about to publish a prequel entitled The Day the King Defaulted: Lessons from the Stop of the Exchequer in 1672.