We perform a simultaneous test for several rational and behavioral factors known to affect the uptake of life annuities in a sample of Americans. We also investigate whether analysts' short-term stock market expectations affect the decision to annuitize retirement wealth. We find that facing...

Although a few systemic risk management approaches have been proposed in the literature and implemented in industry, such as stress test-based scenarios, the impact of such regulations remains unclear. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework to study the impact of systemic risk...

A central problem for regulators and risk managers concerns the risk assessment of an aggregate portfolio defined as the sum of d individual dependent risks Xi. This problem is mainly a numerical issue once the joint distribution of (X1, X2, . . . , Xd) is fully specified. Unfortunately, while...

Assuming that agents' preferences satisfy first-order stochastic dominance, we show how the Expected Utility paradigm can rationalize all optimal investment choices: the optimal investment strategy in any behavioral law-invariant (state-independent) setting corresponds to the optimum for an...

Recent literature deals with bounds on the Value-at-Risk (VaR) of risky portfolios when only the marginal distributions of the components are known. In this paper we study Value-at-Risk bounds when the variance of the portfolio sum is also known, a situation that is of considerable interest in...

This paper proposes a technique to derive the optimal surrender strategy for a variable annuity (VA) as a function of the underlying fund value. This approach is based on splitting the value of the VA into a European part and an early exercise premium following the work of Kim and Yu (1996) and...

Lions and Musiela (2007) give sufficient conditions to verify when a stochastic exponential of a continuous local martingale is a martingale or a uniformly integrable martingale. Blei and Engelbert (2009) and Mijatovi c and Urusov (2012c) give necessary and sufficient conditions in the case of...

In stochastic volatility models based on time-homogeneous diff usions, we provide a simple necessary and suffi cient condition for the discretely sampled fair strike of a variance swap to converge to the continuously sampled fair strike. It extends Theorem 3.8 of Jarrow, Kchia, Larsson and...

This study is devoted to the calculation of appropriate premia and loadings for participating contracts. Our analysis aims at extending the ideas of Buehlmann [2004], and is sequencing the fundamental works of Merton [1974], Longstaff and Schwartz [1995], Briys and de Varenne [1994, 2001]....

We propose a novel model-free approach to obtain the joint risk-neutral distribution among several assets that is consistent with market prices of options on these assets and their weighted index. In an empirical application, we use options on the S&P 500 index and its nine industry sectors. The...