Participating life insurance contracts allow the policyholder to participate in the annual return of a reference portfolio. Additionally, they are often equipped with an annual (cliquet-style) return guarantee. The current low interest rate environment has again refreshed the discussion on risk...

Guarantees embedded variable annuity contracts exhibit option-like payoff features and the pricing of such instruments naturally leads to risk neutral valuation techniques. This paper considers the pricing of two types of guarantees; namely, the Guaranteed Minimum Maturity Benefit and the...

The aim of this paper is to construct a dynamic programming algorithm for pricing variable annuities with GLWB under a stochastic mortality framework. Although our set-up is very general and only requires the Markovian property for the mortality intensity and the asset price processes, in the...

This paper aims to value a Guaranteed Investment Contract (GIC), offered by insurance companies, with a minimum rate of return and an option to surrender the contract (surrender option) at any time before the maturity date. The valuation framework uses a set of different models to value each one...

The paper analyzes the design of participating life insurance contracts with minimum return rate guarantees. Without default risk, the insured receives the maximum of a guaranteed rate and a participation in the investment returns. With default risk, the payoff is modified by a default put...

This paper considers the valuation of equity-linked life insurance contracts that offer an annually guaranteed minimum return. The policy premiums are invested in a reference portfolio that is modeled by means of a regime switching Lévy process where the model parameters depend on a continuous,...

Although the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has gained increasing attention among investors, the extent to which ESG is compensated systematically in the market remains to be investigated. On the outperformance of responsible investing (RI) which incorporates ESG into investment...

This paper proposes a paradigm shift in the valuation of long term contracts, away from classical no-arbitrage pricing towards pricing under the real world probability measure. In contrast to risk neutral pricing, which is a form of relative pricing, the long term average excess return of the...

In this paper we study the asset-liability management of an insurance company selling “participating contracts”. Participating contracts are typical insurance policies sold worldwide.The payoff of a participating policy is linked to the portfolio or the surplus of the insurance company. We...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...