Motivated by the Guaranteed Minimum Death Benefits in various deferred annuities, we investigate the calculation of the expected discounted value of a payment at the time of death. The payment depends on the price of a stock at that time and possibly also on the history of the stock price. If...

The paper studies a discrete counterpart of Gerber et al. (2006). The surplus of an insurance company (before dividends) is modeled as a time-homogeneous Markov chain with possible changes of size +1,0,-1,-2,-3,.... If a barrier strategy is applied for paying dividends, it is shown that the...

The paper is motivated by the valuation problem of guaranteed minimum death benefits in various equity-linked products. At the time of death, a benefit payment is due. It may depend not only on the price of a stock or stock fund at that time, but also on prior prices. The problem is to calculate...

In applications of collective risk theory, complete information about the individual claim amount distribution is often not known, but reliable estimates of its first few moments may be available. For such a situation, this paper develops methods for estimating the optimal dividend barrier and...

The dividends-penalty identity is a relation between three functions: the discounted penalty function without dividends, the discounted penalty function if a barrier dividend strategy is applied, and the expected discounted dividends until ruin. The classical model of risk theory is modified in...

A major problem facing the financial industry today is interest rate fluctuations. An important technique for insulating a fixed‐income portfolio from shifts in the term structure of interest rates is the method of cash‐flow matching. This method can be enhanced by allowing carry forward and...

Motivated by the importance of withdrawal benefits for enhancing sales of variable annuities, we propose a new equity-linked product which provides a dynamic withdrawal benefit (DWB) during the contract period and a minimum guarantee at contract maturity. The term DWB is coined to reflect the...