We examine the impact of asset allocation and contribution rates on the risk of defined benefit (DB) pension schemes, using both a run-off and a shorter 3-year time horizon. Using the 3-year horizon, which is typically preferred by regulators, a high bond allocation reduces the spread of the distribution of surplus. However, this result is reversed when examined on a run-off basis. Furthermore, under both the 3-year horizon and the run-off, the higher bond allocation reduces the median level of surplus. Pressure on the affordability of DB schemes has led to widespread implementation of the so-called de-risking strategies, such as moving away from predominantly equity investments to greater bond investments. If the incentives produced by shorter term risk assessments are contributing to this shift, they might be harming the long-term financial health of the schemes. Contribution rates have relatively lower impact on the risk.

Ex post moral hazard arises when the insured has an unobservable influence on the size of a loss after its occurrence. In automobile (property) insurance, ex post moral hazard could increase in the scope of the repairs and/or the value of the repairs. Both vehicle owners and auto repairers could gain from increasing the scope of repairs, while auto repairers would gain from an increase in the value of repairs. An analysis of 994 Australian road traffic crashes found that ex post moral hazard increased the value of repairs by 46.8 per cent of which 9 percentage points was explained by an increase in the scope of the repairs, which was defined as an increased from 2 to 2.4 parts per auto repair.

This paper investigates the benefits of incorporating diversification effects into the pricing process of insurance policies from two different business lines. The paper shows that, for the same risk reduction, insurers pricing policies jointly can have a competitive advantage over those pricing them separately. However, the choice of competitiveness constrains the underwriting flexibility of joint pricers. The paper goes a step further by modelling explicitly the relationship between premiums and the number of customers in each line. Using the total collected premiums as a criterion to compare the competing strategies, the paper provides conditions for the optimal pricing decision based on policyholders’ sensitivity to price discounts. The results are illustrated for a portfolio of annuities and assurances. Further, using non-life data from the Brazilian insurance market, an empirical exploration shows that most pairs satisfy the condition for being priced jointly, even when pairwise correlations are high.

China and the US are two contrasting countries in terms of functional disability and long-term care. China is experiencing declining family support for long-term care and developing private long-term care insurance. The US has a more developed public aged care system and private long-term care insurance market than China. Changes in the demand for long-term care are driven by the levels, trends and uncertainty in mortality and functional disability. To understand the future potential demand for long-term care, we compare mortality and functional disability experiences in China and the US, using a multi-state latent factor intensity model with time trends and systematic uncertainty in transition rates. We estimate the model with the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) and the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data. The estimation results show that if trends continue, both countries will experience longevity improvement with morbidity compression and a declining proportion of the older population with functional disability. Although the elderly Chinese have a shorter estimated life expectancy, they are expected to spend a smaller proportion of their future lifetime functionally disabled than the elderly Americans. Systematic uncertainty is shown to be significant in future trends in disability rates and our model estimates higher uncertainty in trends for the Chinese elderly, especially for urban residents.

Estimating tail risk measures for portfolios of complex variable annuities is an important enterprise risk management task which usually requires nested simulation. In the nested simulation, the outer simulation stage involves projecting scenarios of key risk factors under the real-world measure, while the inner simulations are used to value pay-offs under guarantees of varying complexity, under a risk-neutral measure. In this paper, we propose and analyse an efficient simulation approach that dynamically allocates the inner simulations to the specific outer scenarios that are most likely to generate larger losses. These scenarios are identified using a proxy calculation that is used only to rank the outer scenarios, not to estimate the tail risk measure directly. As the proxy ranking will not generally provide a perfect match to the true ranking of outer scenarios, we calculate a measure based on the concomitant of order statistics to test whether further tail scenarios are required to ensure, with given confidence, that the true tail scenarios are captured. This procedure, which we call the dynamic importance allocated nested simulation approach, automatically adjusts for the relationship between the proxy calculations and the true valuations and also signals when the proxy is not sufficiently accurate.

The main aim of this paper is to develop an optimal partial hedging strategy that minimises an investor’s shortfall subject to an initial wealth constraint. The risk criterion we employ is a robust tail risk measure called Range Value-at-Risk (RVaR) which belongs to a wider class of distortion risk measures and contains the well-known measures VaR and CVaR as important limiting cases. Explicit forms of such RVaR-based optimal hedging strategies are derived. In addition, we provide a numerical example to demonstrate how to apply this more comprehensive methodology of partial hedging in the area of mixed finance/insurance contracts in the market with long-range dependence.

This paper obtains an optimal strategy in a finite horizon time for a portfolio of a defined contribution (DC) pension fund for an investor with the CRRA utility function. It employs the optimal stochastic control method in a financial market with two different asset markets, one risk-free and another one risky asset in which its jump follows either by a finite or infinite activity Lévy process. Sensitivity of jump parameters in an uncertainty financial market has been studied.

Modelling and forecasting mortality is a topic of crucial importance to actuaries and demographers. However, forecasts from the majority of mortality projection models are continuations of past trends seen in the data. As such, these models are unable to account for external opinions or expert judgement. In this work, we present a method for the incorporation of deterministic opinions into the smoothing and forecasting of mortality rates using constraints. Not only does our approach yield a smooth transition from the past into the future, but also, the shapes of the resulting forecasts are governed by a combination of the opinion inputs and the speed of improvements observed in the data. In addition, our approach offers the possibility to compute the amount of uncertainty around the projected mortality trends conditional on the opinion inputs, and this allows us to highlight some of the pitfalls of deterministic projection methods.

Potentialdata breach losses represent a significant part of operational risk and can be a serious concern for risk managers and insurers. In this paper, we employ the vine copulas under a Bayesian framework to co-model incidences from different data breach types. A full Bayesian approach can allow one to select both the copulas and margins and estimate their parameters in a coherent fashion. In particular, it can incorporate process, parameter, and model uncertainties, and this is very important for applications in risk management under current regulations. We also conduct a series of sensitivity tests on the Bayesian modelling results. Using two public data sets of data breach losses, we find that the overall dependency structure and tail dependence vary significantly between different types of data breaches. The optimally selected vine structure and pairwise copulas suggest more conservative value-at-risk estimates when compared to the other suboptimal copula models.