The effects of COVID-19 on tourism are irreversible, with potential reductions in income, job losses, shifting working landscapes, and visible health-related fears. These adversities are reinforced in the hospitality business, particularly for hotels, the income streams of which rely on...

One of the main challenges investors have to face is model uncertainty. Typically, the dynamic of the assets is modeled using two parameters: the drift vector and the covariance matrix, which are both uncertain. Since the variance/covariance parameter is assumed to be estimated with a certain...

Traditional participating life insurance contracts with year-to-year (cliquet-style) guarantees have come under pressure in the current situation of low interest rates and volatile capital markets, in particular when priced in a market-consistent valuation framework. In addition, such guarantees...

In this paper, we review pricing of the variable annuity living and death guarantees offered to retail investors in many countries. Investors purchase these products to take advantage of market growth and protect savings. We present pricing of these products via an optimal stochastic control...

We study risk-minimization for a large class of insurance contracts. Given that the individual progress in time of visiting an insurance policy's states follows an F-doubly stochastic Markov chain, we describe different state-dependent types of insurance benefits. These cover single payments at...

We study a portfolio selection problem in a continuous-time Itô–Markov additive market with prices of financial assets described by Markov additive processes that combine Lévy processes and regime switching models. Thus, the model takes into account two sources of risk: the jump diffusion...

This paper studies the optimal investment and consumption strategies in a two-asset model. A dynamic Value-at-Risk constraint is imposed to manage the wealth process. By using Value at Risk as the risk measure during the investment horizon, the decision maker can dynamically monitor the exposed...

Risk perception is an idiosyncratic process of interpretation. It is a highly personal process of making a decision based on an individual’s frame of reference that has evolved over time. The purpose of this paper is to find out the risk perception level of equity investors and to identify the...

Life Insurance Retirement Plans (LIRPs) offer tax-deferred cash value accumulation, tax-free withdrawals (if properly structured), and a tax-free death benefit to beneficiaries. Thus, LIRPs share many of the tax advantages of other retirement savings vehicles but with less restrictive...

This is Part III of a series of papers which focus on a general framework for portfolio theory. Here, we extend a general framework for portfolio theory in a one-period financial market as introduced in Part I [Maier-Paape and Zhu, Risks 2018, 6(2), 53] to multi-period markets. This extension is...