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...

Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate...

We discuss risk measures representing the minimum amount of capital a financial institution needs to raise and invest in a pre-specified eligible asset to ensure it is adequately capitalized. Most of the literature has focused on cash-additive risk measures, for which the eligible asset is a...

The theory of acceptance sets and their associated risk measures plays a key role in the design of capital adequacy tests. The objective of this paper is to investigate, in the context of bounded financial positions, the class of surplus-invariant acceptance sets. These are characterized by the...

Recently, a lot of attention has been focused on developing portfolio allocation models that take into account the asymmetric nature of asset return distributions. In this paper, we extend Krokhmal, Palmquist, and Uryasev's approach by using CVaR-like constraints in the traditional portfolio...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is...

We study the problem of finding the worst-case joint distribution of a set of risk factors given prescribed multivariate marginals with nonlinear loss function. The method has applications to any situation where marginals are provided, and bounds need to be determined on total portfolio risk....

We present a model for P/L insurance companies based on Asset-Liability-Management (ALM). We show analytically for multivariate normal distributed assets and claims that an overall minimum of the required risk capital can be obtained by refining the firm's asset allocation when including a ruin...

Risk parity is an asset allocation strategy designed so each asset class contributes equally to overall portfolio risk (as measured by volatility). While risk parity offers potential advantages, its success hinges on key assumptions and a favorable environment for bonds. Like the traditional...

Despite the use of VaR as a means to control risk, using VaR can have the opposite effect. VaR is used by bank and insurance regulators more than any other risk measure. A value-at-risk (VaR) constraint on the probability that future firm equity value will be less than a floor, when the floor is...