Traditional plain vanilla options can be regarded as options on a simple return. These options have convex payoffs and as a consequence of Jensen's inequality, their prices are increasing as a function of maturity in the absence of interest rate. This makes long dated call options as excessively...

We construct a binomial model for a guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit (GMWB) rider to a variable annuity (VA) under optimal policyholder behaviour. The binomial model results in explicitly formulated perfect hedging strategies funded using only periodic fee income. We consider the separate...

The purpose of this article is to value some life insurance contracts in a stochastic interest rate environment taking into account the default risk of the underlying insurance company. The participating life insurance contracts considered here can be expressed as portfolios of barrier options...

Securitization of the rainfall risk involves pooling of the rainfall contingent insurance policies to issue financial instruments in the capital markets to transfer the rainfall risk from the insurers to the investors. Low income households, especially in the developing countries like India...

Low income households, especially in the developing countries could suffer losses due to weather related events such as drought, hurricanes, floods etc. Such losses could cast a household into a chronic poverty cycle - a poverty trap from which the household may find it difficult to re-emerge....

We derive risk-neutral option price formulas for plain-vanilla temperature futures derivatives on the basis of several multi-factor Ornstein-Uhlenbeck temperature models which allow for seasonality in the mean level and volatility. Our main innovation consists in an incorporation of omnipresent...

This paper presents a new transform-based approach for path-independent lattice construction for pricing American options under low-dimensional stochastic volatility models. We derive multidimensional transforms which allow us to construct efficient path-independent lattices for virtually all...

The paper analyzes one of the most common life insurance products — the so-called participating (or with profits) policy. This type of contract stands in contrast to unit-linked (UL) products in that interest is credited to the policy periodically according to some mechanism which smoothes...

This paper explores the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) to two quot;hotquot; issues in life-cycle finance: (1) investing for retirement and (2) deciding when, if ever, to switch careers. Participants in individual retirement accounts do not have the time or the knowledge to make...

A State Price Density (SPD) is the density function of a risk neutral equivalent martingale measure for option pricing, and is indispensible for exotic option pricing and portfolio risk management. Many approaches have been proposed in the last two decades to calibrate a SPD using financial...