The purpose of this article is to design and price a new type of participating life insurance contract. Participating contracts are popular in the US and in European countries; they satisfy various covenants and obey various regulations depending on the country where they are issued. The...

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...

We study the robustness of the results of Milevsky and Huang (2018) on the optimal demand for annuities to the choice of the utility function. To do so, we first propose a new way to span the set of all increasing concave utility functions by exploiting a one-to-one correspondence with the set...

Locally-capped products are an economically important and poorly understood category of structured financial products. These contracts combine a guaranteed payoff with a bonus equal to some accumulation of the capped periodic returns of a reference portfolio. We show that these products often...

This paper develops a general valuation approach to price barrier options when the term structure of interest rates is stochastic. These products' barriers may be constant or stochastic, in particular we examine the case of discounted barriers (at the instantaneous interest rate). So, in...

It is now known that the very impressive investment returns generated by Bernie Madoff were based on a sophisticated Ponzi scheme. Madoff claimed to use a split-strike conversion strategy. This strategy consists of a long equity position plus a long put and a short call. In this paper we examine...

In this article, we propose a new method to price numerically Parisian options by inversion of Laplace transform. We compare this method to other more traditional approaches (Monte-Carlo simulations and partial differential equation solving). We show that this method converges more rapidly and...