We consider lifetime health insurance contracts in which ageing provisions are used to smooth the premium profile. The capital stock accumulated for each individual can be decomposed into two parts: a premium insurance and an annuitised life insurance, only the latter being transferable between insurers without triggering premium changes through risk segmentation. In a simulation based on Germa...

This paper examines the recent experience with insurance and other risk-financing instruments in developing countries in order to gain insights into the effectiveness of these instruments in reducing economic insecurity. Insurance and other risk financing strategies are viewed as efforts to recover from negative income shocks through risk pooling and transfer. Specific examples of public-privat...

Assuming a product space model for biometric and financial events, there exists a rather natural principle for the decomposition of gains of life insurance contracts into a financial and a biometric part using orthogonal projections. In a discrete time framework, the paper shows the connection between this decomposition, locally variance-optimal hedging and the so-called pooling of biometric ri...

The most natural way of ordering portfolios is by comparing their payoffs. A portfolio with payoff higher than the payoff of another portfolio is greater in the sense of portfolio dominance than that other portfolio. Portfolio dominance is a lattice order if the supremum and the infimum of any two portfolios are well-defined. We study security markets with infinitely many securities and arbitra...

I analyze the role of bundling risks to be covered by one multiline integrated risk management policy in the presence of moral hazard. The structure of the optimal multiline policy depends on a firm’s risk-management objective. It is shown that– subject to retaining incentives to invest in risk reduction–the firm might be able to reduce the maximum retained loss by choosing a multiline policy w...

This paper presents a model tha t measures the impact of political risk on portfolio investment when the political risks are multivariate and correlated across countries. The multivariate approach generalizes the single country model but retains most of its characteristics in terms of its ability to price political risk based on the stochastic process of exposure to loss and the expected freque...

The Euler (or gradient) allocation technique defines a financial institution’s marginal cost of a risk exposure via calculation of the gradient of a risk measure evaluated at the institution’s current portfolio position. The technique, however, relies on an arbitrary selection of a risk measure. We reverse the sequence of this approach by calculating the marginal costs of risk exposures for a p...

We conduct a neutral-context laboratory experiment to systematically investigate the role of the hit-by-bus concern in explaining the annuitization puzzle: the low rate of retirement-asset annuitization relative to the predictions of standard models. We vary endowed asset (annuity vs. stock of wealth vs. no explicit endowment), and find a strong endowment effect. Furthermore, we find that the o...

The stochastic modeling and determination of reserves and risk capitals for variable annuity guarantee products are relatively new developments in the insurance industry. The current market practice is largely based on Monte Carlo simulations, which have great engineering flexibility but the demand for heavy computational power can be prohibitive in many cases. In this paper, we distinguish and...

The paper provides novel insights on the effect of a firm’s risk management objective on the optimal design of risk transfer instruments. I analyze the interrelation between the structure of the optimal insurance contract and the firm’s objective to minimize the required equity it has to hold to accommodate losses in the presence of multiple risks and moral hazard. In contrast to the case of ri...