An attractive life insurance product design becomes increasingly important due to demographic change and a declining confidence in state-run pension schemes. Most life insurance contracts are often offered with investment guarantees embedded in the savings part of the product. In addition,...

Although the insurance industry is less affected than the banking industry, the credit crisis has revealed room for improvement in its risk management and supervision. Based on this observation, we formulate ten consequences for risk management and insurance regulation. Many of these reflect...

The aim of this paper is to develop an alternative approach for assessing an insurer's solvency as a proposal for a standard model for Solvency II. Instead of deriving minimum capital requirements-as is done in solvency regulation-our model provides company-specific minimum standards for risk...

In this paper, we first discuss the characteristics and major benefits of the Swiss risk-based capital standards for insurance companies (Swiss Solvency Test), introduced in 2006. As the insurance industry is one of the largest institutional investors in Switzerland, changes to its asset and...

In their 2001 "Journal of Risk and Insurance" article, Stewart C. Myers and James A. Read Jr. propose to use a specific capital allocation method for pricing insurance contracts. We show that in their model framework no capital allocation to lines of business is needed for pricing insurance...

The aim of this article is to identify fair equity-premium combinations for non-life insurers that satisfy solvency capital requirements imposed by regulatory authorities. In particular, we compare target capital derived using the value at risk concept as planned for Solvency II in the European...

Most life insurance contracts embed the right to stop premium payments during the term of the contract (paid-up option). Thereby, the contract is not terminated but continues with reduced benefits and often provides the right to resume premium payments later, thus increasing the previously...

Newly introduced government-subsidized pension products in Germany are required to contain a promise by the seller to provide a “money-back guarantee” at the end of the term. The client is also given the right to stop paying premiums at any time (paid-up option). In this case, the amount of...

Participating life insurance contracts are one of the most important products in the European life insurance market. Even though these contract forms are very common, only very little research has been conducted in respect to their performance. Hence, we conduct a performance analysis to provide...