Traditional participating life insurance contracts with year-to-year (cliquet-style) guarantees have come under pressure in the current situation of low interest rates and volatile capital markets, in particular when priced in a market-consistent valuation framework. In addition, such guarantees...

Deriving an optimal asset allocation for institutional investors hinges crucially on the quality of inputs used in the optimization. If the mean vector and the covariance matrix are known with certainty, the classical mean-variance optimization of Markowitz (1952) produces optimal portfolios....