The increase in life expectancy over the past several decades has been impressive and represents a key challenge for institutions that provide life insurance products. Indeed, when a new actuarial table is released with updated survival and death rates, such institutions need to update the...

Life insurers use accounting and actuarial techniques to smooth reporting of firm assets and liabilities, seeking to transfer surpluses in good years to cover benefit payouts in bad years. Nevertheless, these techniques been criticized as they make it difficult to assess insurers' true financial...

Financial products are priced using risk-neutral expectations justified by hedging portfolios that (as accurate as possible) match the product's payoff. In insurance, premium calculations are based on a real-world best-estimate value plus a risk premium. The insurance risk premium is typically...

Actuarial fairness pertains to the situation in which the price of an insurance contract is equal to its expected outcome. This paradigm is at odds with financial pricing: If two financial contracts have the same expected value, but one is better than the other in the sense of second order...