Why don't people buy annuities? Several explanations have been provided by the previous literature: large fraction of preannuitized wealth in retirees' portfolios; adverse selection; bequest motives; and medical expense uncertainty. This paper uses a quantitative model to assess the importance...

This contribution starts out by noting a conflict of interest between consumers and insurers. Consumers face positive correlation in their assets (health, wealth, wisdom, i.e. skills), causing them to demand a great deal of insurance coverage. Insurers on the other hand eschew positively...

Most theories of risky choice postulate that a decision maker maximizes the expectation of a Bernoulli (or utility or similar) function. We tour 60 years of empirical search and conclude that no such functions have yet been found that are useful for out-of-sample prediction. Nor do we find...

The wealth dynamics of insurance companies strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavorable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity...

As early as the 1970s, European Union (EU) member countries implemented rulesto coordinate insurance markets and regulation. However, with the more recentmovement toward a general single EU market, financial services regulation hastaken on new meaning and priority. Solvency I regulations went...

This study develops and implements a theory and method for analyzing whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for risk averse investors. We develop a test procedure for 'stochastic spanning' for two nested polyhedral portfolio...

Risk exchange is considered here as a cooperative game with transferable utility. The set-up fits markets for insurance, securities and contingent endowments. When convoluted payoff is concave at the aggregate endowment, there is a price-supported core solution. Under variance aversion the...

We analyze the pricing of risky income streams in a world with competitive security markets where investors are constrained by restrictions on possible portfolio holdings. We investigate how we can transfer concepts and pricing techniques from a world without frictions to such a more realistic...

We develop and implement a portfolio optimization method for building investment portfolios that dominate a given benchmark index in terms of third-degree stochastic dominance. Our approach relies on the properties of the semi-variance function, a refinement of an existing 'super-convex'...

In this work we solve in a closed form the problem of an agent who wants to optimise the inter-temporal utility of both his consumption and leisure by choosing: (i) the optimal inter-temporal consumption, (ii) the optimal inter-temporal labour supply, (iii) the optimal share of wealth to invest...