Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address some of the fundamental issues surrounding crop insurance ratemaking, from the perspective of the reinsurer, through the development of a scientific pricing framework. Design/methodology/approach – The generating process of the historical...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal reinsurance contract structure from the crop insurer's perspective. Design/methodology/approach – A very powerful and flexible empirical-based reinsurance model is used to analyze the optimal form of the reinsurance treaty. The...

The Black-Derman-Toy (BDT) model is a popular one-factor interest rate model that is widely used by practitioners. One of its advantages is that the model can be calibrated to both the current market term structure of interest rate and the current term structure of volatilities. The input term...

Let X denote the loss initially assumed by an insurer. In a reinsurance design, the insurer cedes part of its loss, say f(X), to a reinsurer, and thus the insurer retains a loss If(X)=X-f(X). In return, the insurer is obligated to compensate the reinsurer for undertaking the risk by paying the...

This paper describes a simple and efficient method for determining the optimal portfolio for a risk averse investor. The portfolio selection problem is of long standing interest to finance scholars and it has obvious practical relevance. In a complete market the modern procedure for computing...

Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are important numerical tools in the pricing and hedging of complex financial instruments. The effectiveness of QMC methods crucially depends on the discontinuity and the dimension of the problem. This paper shows how the two fundamental limitations can be...

<title>Abstract</title> This paper proposes a new simulation method for pricing Bermudan derivatives that is applicable to problems where the transition density of the underlying asset price process is known analytically. We assume that the owner can exercise the option at a finite, although possibly large,...

In this paper, we propose an estimator for pricing high-dimensional American-style options and show that asymptotically its upper bias converges to zero. An advantage of the proposed estimator is that when combined with low discrepancy sequences, it exhibits a superior rate of convergence....

In this paper we propose a variant of the continuous-time Markowitz mean-variance model by incorporating the Earnings-at-Risk measure in the portfolio optimization problem. Under the Black-Scholes framework, we obtain closed-form expressions for the optimal constant-rebalanced portfolio (CRP)...