The employer-sponsored life insurance (ESLI) market is particularly susceptible to adverse selection due to community-rated premiums, guaranteed issue coverage, and the existence of a well-functioning individual market as a substitute. Using administrative payroll and healthcare claims data from...

Advantageous (or propitious) selection occurs when an increase in the premium of an insurance contract induces high-cost agents to quit, thereby reducing the average cost among remaining buyers. Hemenway (1990) and many subsequent contributions motivate its advent by differences in risk-aversion...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a market-consistent valuation of life insurance participating liabilities sold to a population of partially heterogeneous customers under the joint impact of biometric and financial risk. In particular, the heterogeneity between groups of policyholders...

Death benefits are generally the largest cash flow items that affect the financial statements of life insurers; some may still not have a systematic process to track and monitor death claims. In this article, we explore data clustering to examine and understand how actual death claims differ...

Protecting against unexpected yield curve, inflation, and longevity shifts are some of the most critical issues institutional and private investors must solve when managing post-retirement income benefits. This paper empirically investigates the performance of alternative immunization strategies...

The aim of this paper is to provide a stochastic model useful for assessing the capital requirement for demographic risk in a framework coherent with the Solvency II Directive. The model extends to the market consistent context classical methodologies developed in a local accounting framework....

This paper addresses the problem of approximating the future value distribution of a large and heterogeneous life insurance portfolio which would play a relevant role, for instance, for solvency capital requirement valuations. Based on a metamodel, we first select a subset of representative...

The paper evaluates the performance of the Takaful and insurance companies in Malaysia. It examines the impact of ownership, business model, and market structure on conventional and Takaful companies' performance. The inter-firm comparisons provide information about the performance and...

Life insurance companies, the largest institutional holders of corporate bonds, tilt their portfolios towards higher-yield bonds when interest rates decline. This tilt seems to be primarily driven by an increase in duration rather than credit risk and insurers do not seem to increase the credit...

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...

The purpose of this paper was to identify the key SERVQUAL factors for consumer purchase intention in the context of life insurance products in Malaysia. The study was performed based on primary data using a self-administered questionnaire from the Klang valley region of Malaysia. Using a...

Under the Solvency II regime, life insurance companies are asked to derive their solvency capital requirements from the full loss distributions over the coming year. Since the industry is currently far from being endowed with sufficient computational capacities to fully simulate these...

In this paper, we test the efficiency of least-squares Monte Carlo method to estimate capital requirements in life insurance. We choose a simplified Gaussian evaluation framework where closed-form formulas are available and allow us to obtain solid benchmarks. Extensive numerical experiments...

In this paper, we construct new valuation schemes for the liabilities and economic capital of insurance companies. Specifically, we first build a valuation framework based on SAHARA utility functions, and second we construct a framework based on the cumulative prospect theory that incorporates...

This paper examines the consequences for a life annuity insurance company if the Solvency II Solvency Capital Requirements (SCR) are calibrated based on Expected Shortfall (ES) instead of Value-at-Risk (VaR). We focus on the risk modules of the SCRs for the three risk classes equity risk,...

In Metropolitan Life v. Drainville, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63613 (DC R.I. July 23, 2009), a federal district court in Rhode Island recently explained the requirements that a domestic relations order ("DRO") must satisfy to be a qualified domestic relation order (“QDRO”). The court held an...

Foreign Direct investment serves as a focal source of capital formation in any countries for its economic development in a significant way. This is expected to include all industries and sectors including insurance, especially in developing countries such as India. It is beyond doubt that the...

We consider an investor, with an uncertain life time, endowed with deterministic labor income, who has the possibility to continuously invest in a Black-Scholes market and to buy life insurance or annuities. We solve the optimal consumption, investment and life insurance problem when the...

We use data from a large US life expectancy provider to test for asymmetric information in the secondary life insurance-or life settlements-market. We compare realized lifetimes for a subsample of settled policies relative to all (settled and nonsettled) policies, and find a positive...

According to the ABI (2003), 806 insurance companies were authorized, either by the UK or by another European Economic Area member to carry on insurance business in the UK in 2002. Of these, 592 could carry on general business only (such as motor, household and commercial insurance), 160 were...

The purpose of this study is to discuss the impact of sales performance in life insurance sector. Sales performance in life insurance industry has seen a major concern to practitioners due to severe competition and to design marketing strategy. Further to that, one way to enhance sales...

Traditional life insurance policies offer no equity investment opportunities for the premium paid, and suffer from low returns over the long insurance terms. Modern equity-linked insurance policies offer equity investment opportunities exposed to equity market risk. To combine the low-risk of...

Life insurers are exposed to interest rate risk as their liability side is typically more sensitive to interest rate changes than their asset side. This paper explores why insurers assume this risk using a new accounting-based method to measure interest rate sensitivity of assets and...

Interest rates have been very low for several years, which is particularly challenging for life insurers. Since 2001, German life insurers have had to set an additional reserve due to low interest rates to ensure the protection of policyholders. However, the method introduced at that time to...

This article examines the relevance of information and communication technology (ICT) in modulating the effect of education on life insurance and non-life insurance consumption in 48 African countries for the period 2004-2014. Education is measured with primary school, secondary school and...

There is an increasing influence of machine learning in business applications, with many solutions already implemented and many more being explored. Since the global financial crisis, risk management in banks has gained more prominence, and there has been a constant focus around how risks are...

Phase-type (PH) distributions are defined as distributions of lifetimes of finite continuous-time Markov processes. Their traditional applications are in queueing, insurance risk, and reliability, but more recently, also in finance and, though to a lesser extent, to life and health insurance....

Life Insurance Retirement Plans (LIRPs) offer tax-deferred cash value accumulation, tax-free withdrawals (if properly structured), and a tax-free death benefit to beneficiaries. Thus, LIRPs share many of the tax advantages of other retirement savings vehicles but with less restrictive...

This paper explores the use of neural networks to reduce the computational cost of pricing and hedging variable annuity guarantees. Pricing these guarantees can take a considerable amount of time because of the large number of Monte Carlo simulations that are required for the fair value of these...