Universal life policies are the most popular insurance contract design in theUnited States. They have either a level death benefit paying a fixed faceamount, or an increasing death benefit, which additionally pays the availablecash value, and both types include the option to switch from one to...

Life insurers often claim that the life settlement industry reduces theirsurrender profits and leads to an adverse shift in their portfolio of insuredrisks, i.e., bad risks remain in the portfolio instead of surrendering.In this paper, we aim to quantify the effect of altered...

Common features in life insurance contracts are an interest rate guarantee andpolicyholder participation in the returns of insurers’ reference portfolio, which canbe of substantial value. The aim of this paper is to analyze the model risk involvedin pricing and risk assessment that arises from...

In diesem Beitrag wird mit dem Swiss Solvency Test (SST) ein mögliches Referenzmodellfür die Ausgestaltung von Solvency II vorgestellt. Der SST wurde vomschweizerischen Bundesamt für Privatversicherungen entwickelt und zu Beginn desJahres 2006 für grosse Lebens- und Schadenversicherer...

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of nonlinear dependencies on a nonlifeinsurers risk and return profile. To achieve this, we integrate several copulamodels in a dynamic financial analysis (DFA) framework and conduct numericaltests within a simulation study. We also test several...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of different asset management and surplus distributionstrategies in life insurance on risk-neutral pricing and shortfall risk. In general,these feedback mechanisms affect the contract’s payoff and hence directly influence pricingand risk measurement. To...

Participating life insurance contracts typically contain various types of implicit options. These implicit options can be very valuable and can thus represent a sig-nificant risk to the insurance companies issuing these contracts in case of in-sufficient risk management. Options can get...

Most life insurance contracts embed the right to stop premium payments during the termof the contract (paid-up option). Thereby, the contract is not terminated but continueswith reduced benefits and often provides the right to resume premium payments later,thus increasing the previously reduced...

Fair pricing of embedded options in life insurance contracts is usually conducted by using risk-neutral valuation. This pricing framework assumes a perfect hedging strategy, which insurance companies can hardly pursue in practice. In this paper, we extend the risk-neutral valuation concept with...

In comparing an immediate life annuity with a payout-equivalent investment fundpayout plan (self-annuitization), research to date has focused mainly on shortfallprobabilities of self-annuitization. As an exception, Schmeiser and Post (2005)propose a family strategy where the chances of...