The paper illustrates the efficiency features of the Italian banking system through a review of the most important empirical studies over the last fifteen years. Particular emphasis is given to DEA (dynamic envelopment analysis) studies and to their capability to investigate economies of scale...

This paper studies the hedging problem of life insurance policies, when the mortality and interest rates are stochastic. We focus primar- ily on stochastic mortality. We represent death arrival as the rst jump time of a doubly stochastic process, i.e. a jump process with stochastic intensity. We...

The paper presents closed-form Delta and Gamma hedges for annuities and death assurances, in the presence of both longevity and interest-rate risk. Longevity risk is modeled through an extension of the classical Gompertz law, while interest rate risk is modeled via an Hull-and-White process. We...

Longevity risk transfer is a popular choice for annuity providers such as pension funds. This paper formalizes the trade-off between the cost and the risk relief of such choice, when the annuity provider uses value-at-risk to assess risk. Using first-order approximations we show that, if the...

This paper studies the hedging problem of life insurance policies, when the mortality and interest rates are stochastic. We focus primarily on stochastic mortality. We represent death arrival as the first jump time of a doubly stochastic process, i.e. a jump process with stochastic intensity. We...

This article provides natural hedging strategies for life insurance and annuity businesses written on a single generation or on different generations in the presence of both longevity and interest-rate risks. We obtain closed-form solutions for delta and gamma hedges against cohort-based...