Longevity risk threatens the financial stability of private and government sponsored defined benefit pension systems as well as social security schemes, in an environment already characterized by persistent low interest rates and heightened financial uncertainty. The mortality experience of...

The risk profile of an insurance company involved in annuity business is heavily affected by the uncertainty in future mortality trends. It is problematic to capture accurately future survival patterns, in particular at retirement ages when the effects of the rectangularization phenomenon and...

In this paper we present a price model for the Guaranteed Lifelong Withdrawal Benefit, an option embedded in Variable Annuity policies, which gives the insured the possibility to withdraw from a fund a guaranteed amount annually, even if the account value has fallen below this amount. We...

Purpose – The determination of the capital requirements represents the first Pillar of Solvency II. The main purpose of the new solvency regulation is to obtain more realistic modelling and assessment of the different risks insurance companies are exposed to in a balance-sheet perspective. In...

Castagnetti, Rossi and Trapani (2014) propose two max-type statistics to test for the presence of a factor structure in a large stationary panel data model. We investigate the use of alternative approaches as average-type and Hausman-type statistics. We show that both approaches can not be used....

Castagnetti et al. (2015) propose two max-type statistics to test for the presence of a factor structure in a large stationary panel data model. In this contribution, we study the use of Hausman-type statistics based on the CCE estimator of Pesaran (2006) and the IE estimator developed by Bai...

This paper develops a novel asymptotic theory for panel models with common shocks. We assume that contemporaneous correlation can be generated by both the presence of common regressors among units and weak spatial dependence among the error terms. Several characteristics of the panel are...

This paper considers measures of uncertainty used in economic estimation. Our first contribution is to address the theoretical relationship between cross-section and time series measures, highlighting the reasons why these might diverge. In a subsequent empirical section, we compare measures of...

We complement existing inferential theory for panel factor models by deriving the asymptotics for the first differences of the estimated factors and common components obtained from a non-stationary panel factor model. As an application, we propose an estimator for the long run variance of the...