We study the valuation of unit-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. Instead of solving an optimal stopping problem, we propose a more realistic approach accounting for policyholders’ rationality in exercising their surrender option. The valuation is conducted at the...

We study the effect of secondary markets on equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. The policyholders are assumed to be boundedly rational in giving up their contracts, and a proportion of policyholders will access the secondary markets instead of surrendering the...

The most natural way of ordering portfolios is by comparing their payoffs. If a portfolio has a payoff higher than the payoff of another portfolio, then it is greater than the other portfolio. This order is called the portfolio dominance order. An important property that a portfolio dominance...

We analyse contracts which pay out a guaranteed minimum rate of return and a fraction of a positive excess rate, which is specified on the basis of a benchmark portfolio. These contracts are closely related to unit--linked life--insurance/savings plan products and can be considered as...

The topic of insolvency risk in connection with life insurance companies has recently attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, the question is investigated of how the value of the equity and of the liability of a life insurance company are affected by the default risk and the choice...

We study the valuation and hedging of unit-linked life insurance contracts in a setting where mortality intensity is governed by a stochastic process. We focus on model risk arising from different specifications for the mortality intensity. To do so we assume that the mortality intensity is...

In this paper, we consider the net loss of a life insurance company issuing identical equity-linked pure endowment contracts in the case of periodic premiums. Under this construction, financial risks as well as the mortality risk are included. Based on Møller (1998), we particularly investigate...

We use a panel cointegration model with multiple time- varying individual effects to control for the enigmatic missing factors in the credit spread puzzle. Our model specification enables as to capture the unobserved dynamics of the systematic risk premia in the bond market. In order to estimate...

It is commonly assumed in private value auctions that bidders have no information about the realization of the other bidders' valuations. Nevertheless, an informative public signal about the realization may be released by a bidder while he learns his own valuation. Using a simple discrete...