In an editorial in ASTIN Bulletin, Hans Bühlmann (2002) suggests it is time to change the teaching of life insurance theory towards the real life challenges of that industry. The following note is a response to this editorial

Under a guaranteed annuity option, an insurer guarantees to convert a policyholder`s accumulated funds to a life annuity at a fixed rate when the policy matures. If the annuity rates provided under the guarantee are more beneficial to the policyholder than the prevailing rates in the market the...

We consider a financial market driven by a continuous time homogeneous Markov chain. Conditions for absence of arbitrage and for completeness are spelled out, non-arbitrage pricing of derivatives is discussed, and details are worked out for some cases.

An assumption concerning the long-term rate of return on assets is made by actuaries when they value defined-benefit pension plans.

How does a change in the risk-free interest-rate affect the value of a non-life insurance company or portfolio? Risk managers typically argue that there should be little impact as long as assets and liabilities are properly matched.

In this paper, we propose an analytic analogue to the simulation procedure described in Taylor (1997). We apply the formulas to a Belgian data set and discuss the interaction between a priori and a posteriori ratemakings.

The probability density function of the time of ruin in the classical model with exponential claim sizes is obtained directly by inversion of the associated Laplace transform.

This paper aims to study the kind of dependence induced by the introduction of correlated latent variables in the annual numbers of claims reported by policyholders.

In this paper non-normal distributions via scale mixtures are introduced into insurance applications. The symmetric distributions of interest are the Student-t and exponential power (EP) distributions. ... We shall show that the computational burden for the Bayesian calculations is alleviated...

This paper presents a universal framework for pricing financial and insurance risks. Examples are given for pricing contingent payoffs, where the underlying asset or liability can be either traded or not traded...