This paper develops and estimates a model for the bonus-crediting mechanism in relation to with-profits policies issued by Danish life insurance and pension companies. The market for pension and life insurance savings contracts is generally highly opaque, but our proposed model explains a...

This paper analyzes an explicit return smoothing mechanism which has recently been introduced as part of a new type of pension savings contract that has been offered by Danish life insurers. We establish the payoff function implied by the return smoothing mechanism and show that its...