The financial guarantees embedded in variable annuity (VA) contracts expose insurers to a wide range of risks, lapse risk being one of them. When policyholders' lapse behavior differs from the assumptions used to hedge VA contracts, the effectiveness of dynamic hedging strategies can be...

The concept of best-estimate, prescribed by regulators to value insurance liabilities for accounting and solvency purposes, has recently been discussed extensively in the industry and related academic literature. To differentiate hedgeable and non-hedgeable risks in a general case, recent...

In this paper we study the asset-liability management of an insurance company selling “participating contracts”. Participating contracts are typical insurance policies sold worldwide.The payoff of a participating policy is linked to the portfolio or the surplus of the insurance company. We...

We investigate the impact of counterparty risk on contract design in the reinsurance market. We study a multiplicative default risk model, with partial recovery and where the probability of the reinsurer's default depends on the loss incurred by the insurer. The seller is assumed to be...