Life insurers are exposed to interest rate risk, and their liability side is typically more sensitive to interest rate changes than their asset side. This paper develops an accounting-based measure of interest rate sensitivity. My approach uses the coexistence of historical cost and market value...

Guaranteed renewability is a prominent feature in many health and life insurance markets. It is well established in the literature that, when there is (only) risk type uncertainty, the optimal GR contract with renewal price set at the actuarially fair price for low risk types provides full...

Rather than taking on more risk, US insurers hit hard by the crisis pulled back from risk taking, relative to insurers hit less hard by the crisis. Capital requirements alone do not explain this risk reduction: insurers hit hard reduced risk within assets with identical regulatory treatment....

We study how retail savings products can share market risk across investor cohorts, thereby completing financial markets. Financial intermediaries smooth returns by varying reserves, which are passed on between successive investor cohorts, redistributing wealth across cohorts. Using data on euro...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a market-consistent valuation of life insurance participating liabilities sold to a population of partially heterogeneous customers under the joint impact of biometric and financial risk. In particular, the heterogeneity between groups of policyholders...

Households buy life insurance as part of their liquidity management. The option to surrender such a policy can serve as a buffer when a household faces a liquidity need. In this study, we investigate empirically which individual and household specific sociodemographic factors influence the...

With-profit life insurance contracts are designed with a return smoothing collective savings component sharing the investment risks amongst different generations of policyholders. We analyze the resulting implications from the point of view of a multi-asset mean-variance investor by evaluating...

Guaranteed renewability is a prominent feature in many health and life insurance markets. It is well established in the literature that, when there is (only) risk type uncertainty, the optimal GR contract with renewal price set at the actuarially fair price for low risk types provides full...

This study investigates the effect of risk aversion of single-parent households with at least one child under 18 on life insurance ownership. Analyzing the 1992-2013 Survey of Consumer Finances datasets, we found that the likelihood of owning term life insurance decreases as risk aversion...