This paper explains securitization of insurance risk by describing its essential components and its economic rationale. We use examples and describe recent securitization transactions...

Mortality dynamics are characterized by changes in mortality regimes. This paper describes a Markov regime switching model which incorporates mortality state switches into mortality dynamics. Using the 1901-2005 US population mortality data, we illustrate that regime switching models perform...

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...

This paper proposes a model for a defined benefit pension plan to minimize total funding variation while controlling expected total pension cost and funding downside risk throughout the life of a pension cohort. With this setup, we first investigate the plan's optimal contribution and asset...

This paper examines the market price of risk for discount bond prices under an affine term structure of interest rates. The usual relation plays two roles. First, it is the definition of market price of risk and, second, it provides a no arbitrage condition for the discount bond market. Here the...

There has been a surge of interest in recent years from defined benefit pension plan sponsors in de-risking their plans with strategies such as “longevity hedges” and “pension buyouts” (Lin et al., 2015). While buyouts are attractive in terms of value creation, they are capital intensive...

The paper discusses how to assess risk by computing the best upper and lower bounds on the expected value E[φ(X)], subject to the constraints E[Xⁱ] = µ_i for i = 0, 1, 2, . . . , n. φ(x) can take the form of the indicator function φ(x) = 𝕀_(−∞,K](x) in which the bounds on Pr(X ≤ K)...

Given the rising cost of maintaining defined benefit (DB) pensions, there has been a surge of activities in recent years by DB plan sponsors to transfer their pension risk through strategies such as buy-ins and buy-outs. As buy-in and buy-out transaction pipelines grow, insurers actively...