We analyze the benefit to the insured of newly traded, innovative life insurance contracts. On a sequence of yearly reference days, the insured can choose between a guaranteed return (linked to the insurer's asset result) and a capped index participation. The cap is adjusted at the beginning of...

Endowment life insurance products contain a collective component resulting in smoothed returns. By unsmoothing the data of German life insurers we are able to extract the risk/return pattern of the underlying financial assets. Thus, we can analyze mean-variance optimal portfolios including a...

With-profit life insurance contracts are designed with a return smoothing collective savings component sharing the investment risks amongst different generations of policyholders. We analyze the resulting implications from the point of view of a multi-asset mean-variance investor by evaluating...

We incorporate an illiquid life insurance investment in the multi-period investment strategy of an investor with constant relative risk aversion and independent and identically distributed returns. In our setup, the liquid and the illiquid assets are risky and correlated and the illiquid...