There are large, upfront, fixed costs to writing a life insurance policy. Both agent commission and direct underwriting costs (e.g., fees for physicals and blood tests) are fully paid a few years into contracts that can last 10-30 years. Because of these upfront costs, insurers can actually lose...

Life insurance contracts can be exceptionally long term and are typically written with a level premium structure. Because death risk increases with age, the actuarial value of a life insurance policy increases over time and becomes positive far enough into the policy. Life insurance is also...

We construct an optimal investment portfolio model with deferred annuities for an individual investor saving for retirement. The objective function consists of power utility in terms of secured retirement income from the deferred annuity purchases, as well as bequest from remaining wealth...

Adverse selection plays a prominent role in the insurance literature due to its negative implications for insurer financial performance and stability. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence consistent with the existence of adverse selection in the U.S. insurance market. Potential...

A computationally appealing methodology for the valuation of large variable annuities portfolios is a metamodelling framework that evaluates a small set of representative contracts, fits a predictive model based on these computed values, and then extrapolates the model to estimate the values of...

We re-examine insurance purchases when life insurance and life annuities carry loads. The life cycle literature says that it is optimal to participate in these insurance markets throughout life, even under loads. A life annuity phase backs directly onto a life insurance phase. However, the...

Section 1035 of the current US tax code allows policyholders to exchange their variableannuity policy for a similar product while maintaining tax-deferred status. When the variableannuity contains a long-term guarantee, this “lapse-and-reentry” strategy allows the policyholderto potentially...

Life insurance products are priced according to two reciprocal requirements. As finacnial products, they must yield returns to investors, but decreasingly so with increased risk exposure. On the other hand, they must be priced to reflect the providers' risk exposure. Thus, the pricing and...

Actuarial fairness pertains to the situation in which the price of an insurance contract is equal to its expected outcome. This paradigm is at odds with financial pricing: If two financial contracts have the same expected value, but one is better than the other in the sense of second order...