Interest rates are one of the main risk factors for insurance companies. Both assets and liabilities react to the movement of interest rates. Therefore, it is essential to have an adequate model of interest rates for Solvency II applications. Here, we address some of the existing issues under...

We introduce here for the first time the long-term swap rate, char- acterised as the fair rate of an overnight indexed swap with infinitely many exchanges. Furthermore we analyse the relationship between the long-term swap rate, the long-term yield, and the long-term simple rate, considered as...

Life insurers typically grant policyholders a surrender option. We demonstrate that the resulting lapse risk could materialise in the form of a "policyholder run" if interest rates were to increase sharply. An inverse stress test based on a unique set of regulatory panel data suggests that...

The life insurance sector is exposed to systematic liquidity risk, because policyholders would have a common incentive to surrender their policies in the event of a severe macroeconomic shock. Life insurers would, then, have to sell assets, and these fire sales would amplify the original shock....

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

The model derives risky corporate bond prices (or equivalently credit spreads) subject to credit default and migration risk, based on an extended version of the Jarrow, Lando and Turnbull model, under a risk-neutral framework, as a result of the simulation of a continuous time, time-homogeneous...

In this paper we review the pricing and model calibration of Credit Default Swaps referring to both the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) CDS contract and credit model standardization guidelines. Furthermore we provide an Excel pricing workbook to supplement the materials...