Life insurers massively sell savings contracts with surrender options which allow policyholders to withdraw a guaranteed amount before maturity. These options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Using data on German life insurers, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in...

India's insurance sector has been growing dynamically in the last couple of years. Despite the suite of reforms that have been implemented to stoke the sector's growth, it still has a long way to go, as its share in the global insurance market remains abysmally low. In this paper, we analyse the...

Global diversification of financial institutions, including the insurance sector, has proven beneficial to many economies by providing them with increasing capital flow, higher competition, and introduction of newer technologies and distribution channels. This paper aims to critically evaluate...

Group life insurance for employees is one of numerous voluntary insurance products covering employees’ personal risks. It can be an important complement to mandatory insurance arrangements (especially social insurance schemes) that provide personal coverage for workers. While employees may...

Life insurers sell savings contracts with surrender options, allowing policyholders to prematurely withdraw guaranteed surrender values. Surrender options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Hence, higher interest rates raise surrender rates, as we document for the German life...

In the last decade, the financial situation of pension funds, in Tunisia, worsened because of demographic and economic factors. These changes will make the solidarity between generations more difficult and will prompt the government to institute some reforms regulating basic pension. This...

Motivated by a recent demographic study establishing a link betweenmacroeconomic fluctuations and the mortality index kt in the Lee-Cartermodel, we assess the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on the solvencyof a life insurance company. Liabilities in our stochastic simulationframework are...