Misspecification tests for log-normal and over-dispersed poisson chain-ladder models

Despite the widespread use of chain-ladder models, so far no theory was available to test for model specification. The popular over-dispersed Poisson model assumes that the over-dispersion is common across the data. A further assumption is that accident year effects do not vary across development years and vice versa. The log-normal chain-ladder model makes similar assumptions. We show that these assumptions can easily be tested and that similar tests can be used in both models. The tests can be implemented in a spreadsheet. We illustrate the implementation in several empirical applications. While the results for the log-normal model are valid in finite samples, those for the over-dispersed Poisson model are derived for large cell mean asymptotics which hold the number of cells fixed. We show in a simulation study that the finite sample performance is close to the asymptotic performance.