The paper examines the structural and organisational problems of social insurancesystems in Brazil and the Argentine in order to illuminate current debates about pension‘reform’. Much of the present discussion depicts social insurance ‘crisis’ as a modernphenomenon. Similarly,...

This paper examines the decline of National Insurance in Britain, as witnessedby its declining share of all social security spending and the steady dilution ofthe “contributory principle” on which it was originally based. It argues that thisdecline is not an accident: under governments of...

Conducted by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the labour force survey is the main source of information regarding the labour force in Israel.

The focuses are on the study of risk management of natural disasters from the perspective of complex systems, using the example of Mexico. It develops the theory of an arrival process taking into account an early warning system and we use it to create appropriate actuarial models...

Cummins et al. (1994) provide a conceptual framework for policymakers to use in analyzing risk-based capital systems. Based on their framework, this article provides an overview and critical analysis of risk-based capital requirements, with a focus on property/casualty insurance, as implemented...

The aim of this paper is to discuss different methods for risk assessment in theGerman automobile industry. We present the traditional approach for classifyingrisks, which is actually applied in the German market, and discuss one crucial difficulty inherent to this approach for proper risk...

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...

In this paper, we first discuss the characteristics and major benefits of the Swissrisk-based capital standards for insurance companies (Swiss Solvency Test), introduced in 2006. As the insurance industry is one of the largest institutional investors in Switzerland, changes to its asset and...

We analyze the effect of enhanced annuities on an insurer engaging in individualunderwriting. We use a frailty model for the heterogeneity of the insured populationand model the individual underwriting by a random variable that positivelycorrelates with the corresponding frailty factor. For a...

The aim of this paper is to develop an alternative approach for assessing an insurer’s solvency as a proposal for a standard model for Solvency II. Instead ofderiving minimum capital requirements—as it is done in solvency regulation—our model provides company-specific minimum standards for...