Essays on the Pricing of Life Insurance Portfolios with Embedded Options and the Merits of Pooling Claims
Author: Carolina Orozco Garcia
Publisher:
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRecent demographic changes and financial crises have substantially challenged pension schemes worldwide. This dissertation aims to provide insight into the stream of participating life insurances and insurance portfolios. The analysis concentrates on premium sensitivities and adequate adjustments in risk-management strategies - essentially investment allocations and capital requirements - when changing the underlying assumptions. The first three articles analyse insurance products with long-term investment. The first article, "How Sensitive is the Pricing of Lookback and Interest Rate Guarantees when Changing the Modelling Assumptions?", investigates the option-price sensitivity of two common embedded guarantees in unit-linked products - namely, a minimum interest rate and lookback guarantees - when the initial pricing assumptions are uncertain. The analysis showed that lookback guarantees result in a higher risk in respect to changes in volatility parameters, while minimum interest rate are shown to be more sensitive to changes in the interest-rate parameters. The second article, "Is Fair Pricing Possible? An Analysis of Participating Life Insurance Portfolios", focuses on the fair pricing of a portfolio of policies when the default risk is considered. The risk-sharing that arises from the pooling of insurance policies may generate inequalities in the fairness of the premium paid by policyholders of different generations that belong to the same portfolio. The results show that conservative investment strategies, together with important equity contributions, are required to ensure the fair pricing of all generations that take part in the insurance portfolio. Under more risky investment strategies, wealth transfer among generations is unavoidable. The third paper, "Fair Pricing of Voluntary Participating Life Insurance Portfolios under Stochastic Interest Rates", is an extension of the second paper of this dissertation (cf. O.