In the industry, generally, reserving actuaries use a mix of reserving methods to derive their best estimates. On the basis of the best estimate, Solvency 2 requires the use of a one-year volatility of the reserves. When internal models are used, such one-year volatility has to be provided by the reserving actuaries. Due to the lack of closed-form formulas for the one-year volatility of Bornhuetter-Ferguson, Cape-Cod and Benktander-Hovinen, reserving actuaries have limited possibilities to estimate such volatility apart from scaling from tractable models, which are based on other reserving methods. However, such scaling is technically difficult to justify cleanly and awkward to interact with. The challenge described in this editorial is therefore to come up with similar models like those of Mack or Merz-Wüthrich for the chain ladder, but applicable to Bornhuetter-Ferguson, mix Chain-Ladder and Bornhuetter-Ferguson, potentially Cape-Cod and Benktander-Hovinen — and their mixtures.

Stochastic modeling of mortality/longevity risks is necessary for internal models of (re)insurers under the new solvency regimes, such as Solvency II and the Swiss Solvency Test. In this paper, we propose a mortality model which fulfills all requirements imposed by these regimes. We show how the model can be calibrated and applied to the simultaneous modeling of both mortality and longevity risk for several populations. The main contribution of this paper is a stochastic trend component which explicitly models changes in the long-term mortality trend assumption over time. This allows to quantify mortality and longevity risk over the one-year time horizon prescribed by the solvency regimes without relying on nested simulations. We illustrate the practical ability of our model by calculating solvency capital requirements for some example portfolios, and we compare these capital requirements with those from the Solvency II standard formula.

We put one of the predictions of adverse-selection models to the test, using data from the Danish automobile insurance market: that there is a positive correlation between claims risk and insurance coverage. We can find a statistically significant insurance coverage--risk correlation when coverage is expressed relative to the insurance premium, but not when it is expressed in monetary terms.

This paper provides a detailed quantitative assessment of the impact of capital and default probability on product pricing and shareholder value for a life insurer providing life annuities. A multi-period cash flow model, allowing for stochastic mortality and asset returns, imperfectly elastic product demand, as well as frictional costs, is used to derive value-maximizing capital and pricing strategies for a range of one-year default probability levels reflecting differences in regulatory regimes including Solvency II. The model is calibrated using realistic assumptions. The sensitivity of results is assessed. The results show that value-maximizing life insurers should target higher solvency levels than the Solvency II regulatory one-year 99.5% probability under assumptions of reasonable levels of policyholder's aversion to insolvency risk. Even in the case of less restrictive solvency probabilities, policyholder price elasticity and solvency preferences are shown to be important factors for a life insurer's value-maximizing strategy.

It is essential for insurance regulation to have a clear picture of the risk measures that are used. We compare different mathematical interpretations of the Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR) definition from Solvency II that can be found in the literature. We introduce a mathematical modeling framework that enables us to make a mathematically rigorous comparison. The paper shows similarities, differences, and properties such as convergence of the different SCR interpretations. Moreover, we generalize the SCR definition to future points in time based on a generalization of the value at risk. This allows for a sound definition of the Risk Margin. Our study helps to make the Solvency II insurance regulation more consistent.

While extensive literature exists on the valuation and risk management of financial guarantees embedded in insurance contracts, both the corresponding longevity guarantees and interactions between financial and longevity guarantees are often ignored. The present paper provides a framework for a joint analysis of financial and longevity guarantees, and applies this framework to different annuity conversion options in deferred unit-linked annuities. In particular, we analyze and compare different versions of so-called guaranteed annuity options and guaranteed minimum income benefits with respect to the value of the option and the resulting risk for the insurer. Furthermore, we examine whether and to what extent an insurance company is able to reduce the risk by typical risk management strategies. The analysis is based on a combined stochastic model for both financial market and future survival probabilities. We show that different annuity conversion options have significantly different option values, and that different risk management strategies lead to a significantly different risk for the insurance company.

In this paper, following an open portfolio approach, we show how to estimate a Bonus-malus system evolution.

Considering a model for the number of new annual policies, we obtain ML estimators, asymptotic distributions and confidence regions for the expected number of new policies entering the portfolio in each year, as well as for the expected number and proportion of insureds in each bonus class, by year of enrollment. Confidence regions for the distribution of policyholders result in confidence regions for optimal bonus scales.

Our treatment is illustrated by an example with numerical results.

Albrecher et al. (Albrecher, H., Mayer Ph., Schoutens, W. (2008) General lower bounds for arithmetic Asian option prices. Applied Mathematical Finance, 15, 123–149) have proposed model-independent lower bounds for arithmetic Asian options. In this paper we provide an alternative and more elementary derivation of their results. We use the bounds as control variates to develop a simple Monte Carlo method for pricing contracts with Asian-style features. The conditioning idea that is inherent in our approach also inspires us to propose a new semi-analytic pricing approach. We compare both approaches and conclude that these both have their merits and are useful in practice. In particular, we point out that our newly proposed Monte Carlo method allows to deal with Asian-style products that appear in insurance (e.g., unit-linked contracts) in a very efficient way, and outperforms other known Monte Carlo methods that are based on control variates.

We analyze and compare the impact of tax incentives and of introducing enhanced annuities on annuitization behavior considering heterogeneity among the insured. We find that tax incentives for annuitization result in a significant increase of the portion of people who should annuitize and also an increase of the insurer's profit since less healthy individuals also annuitize, i.e. adverse selection is reduced. However, the problem that different insured receive a different value for money is even increased by tax incentives. If enhanced annuities are introduced, the percentage of insured who should annuitize further increases. Adverse selection is further reduced and the differences in value for money from annuitizing shrink.

For variable annuity policies, management fees for the most basic guarantees are charged at a constant rate throughout the term of the policy. This creates a misalignment of risk and income – the fee income is low when the option value is high, and vice versa. In turn, this may create adverse incentives for policyholders, for example, encouraging surrenders when the options are far out-of-the-money.

In this paper, we explore a new fee structure for variable annuities, where the fee rate supporting the cost of guarantees depends on the moneyness of those guarantees. We derive formulas for calculating the fee rates assuming fees are paid only when the guarantees are in-the-money, or are close to being in-the-money, and we illustrate with some numerical examples. We investigate the effect of this new fee structure on the surrender decision.

This article proposes a claims reserving model for dependent lines of business with the accommodation of association among triangles by a copula function. We show that the family of elliptical copulas is a pretty convenient choice to capture the dependencies introduced by various sources, including the common calendar year effects. To quantify the associated reserving variability, we resort to parametric bootstrapping techniques for simulating the predictive distribution of outstanding liabilities and for calculating the three components of predictive uncertainty: the model error, the process error and the estimation error. Numerical analysis is performed for a portfolio of casualty insurance from a major U.S. insurer.

We consider the class of concave distortion risk measures to study how choice is influenced by the decision-maker's attitude to risk and provide comparative statics results. We also assume ambiguity about the probability distribution of the risk and consider a framework à la Klibanoff, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005; A smooth model of decision making under ambiguity. Econometrica, 73, 1849–1892) to study the value of information that resolves ambiguity. We show that this value increases with greater ambiguity, with greater ambiguity aversion, and in some cases with greater risk aversion. Finally, we examine whether a more risk-averse and a more ambiguity-averse individual will invest in more effort to shift his initial risk distribution to a better target distribution.

An optimal reinsurance problem from the perspective of an insurer is studied in this paper, where an upper limit is imposed on a reinsurer's expected loss over a prescribed level. In order to reduce the moral hazard, we assume that both the insurer and the reinsurer are obligated to pay more as the amount of loss increases in a typical reinsurance treaty. We further assume that the optimization criterion preserves the convex order. Such a criterion is very general as most of the criteria for optimal reinsurance problems in the literature preserve the convex order. When the reinsurance premium is calculated as a function of the actuarial value of coverage, we show via a stochastic dominance approach that any admissible reinsurance policy is dominated by a stop-loss reinsurance or a two-layer reinsurance, depending upon the amount of the reinsurance premium. Moreover, we obtain a similar result to Mossin's Theorem and find that it is optimal for the insurer to cede a loss as much as possible under the net premium principle. To further examine the reinsurance premium for the optimal piecewise linear reinsurance policy, we assume the expected value premium principle and derive the optimal reinsurance explicitly under (1) the criterion of minimizing the variance of the insurer's risk exposure, and (2) the criterion of minimizing the risk-adjusted value of the insurer's liability where the liability valuation is carried out using the cost-of-capital approach based on the conditional value at risk.

Ratemaking is one of the most important tasks of non-life actuaries. Usually, the ratemaking process is done in two steps. In the first step, a priori ratemaking, an a priori premium is computed based on the characteristics of the insureds. In the second step, called the a posteriori ratemaking, the past claims experience of each insured is considered to the a priori premium and set the final net premium. In practice, for automobile insurance, this correction is usually done with bonus-malus systems, or variations on them, which offer many advantages. In recent years, insurers have accumulated longitudinal information on their policyholders, and actuaries can now use many years of informations for a single insured. For this kind of data, called panel or longitudinal data, we propose an alternative to the two-step ratemaking approach and argue this old approach should no longer be used. As opposed to a posteriori models of cross-section data, the models proposed in this paper generate premiums based on empirical results rather than inductive probability. We propose a new way to deal with bonus-malus systems when panel data are available. Using car insurance data, a numerical illustration using at-fault and non-at-fault claims of a Canadian insurance company is included to support this discussion. Even if we apply the model for car insurance, as long as another line of business uses past claim experience to set the premiums, we maintain that a similar approach to the model proposed should be used.

In the recent subprime mortgage crisis, which has caused banks and insurance companies to go bankrupt or into acquisition, the lender and insurer have exhibited not only correlated defaults when exposed to common risk factors but also counterparty default risk, which is triggered by mortgage defaults. Given the correlated defaults and the counterparty default risk, we use the reduced-form approach to derive the closed-form formulas of mortgage insurance contracts with premium refunds, annual premiums and upfront premiums. Regardless of the nature of the premium structures, the numerical analysis with parameter calibration demonstrates that both the correlated defaults and the counterparty default risk significantly impact mortgage insurance premiums, particularly in long-term mortgage loans.

We introduce a stochastic model for the development of attritional and large claims in long-tail lines of business and present a corresponding “chain ladder-like” IBNR method which allows the use of claims payment data for attritional and claims incurred data for large losses. We derive formulas for the mean squared error of prediction and apply the method to a German motor third party liability portfolio.

We consider the multivariate Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional-Tail-Expectation (CTE) risk measures introduced in Cousin and Di Bernardino (Cousin, A. and Di Bernardino, E. (2013) Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 119, 32–46; Cousin, A. and Di Bernardino, E. (2014) Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, 55(C), 272–282). For absolutely continuous Archimedean copulas, we derive integral formulas for the multivariate VaR and CTE Archimedean risk measures. We show that each component of the multivariate VaR and CTE functional vectors is an integral transform of the corresponding univariate VaR measures. For the class of Archimedean copulas, the marginal components of the CTE vector satisfy the following properties: positive homogeneity (PH), translation invariance (TI), monotonicity (MO), safety loading (SL) and VaR inequality (VIA). In case marginal risks satisfy the subadditivity (MSA) property, the marginal CTE components are also sub-additive and hitherto coherent risk measures in the usual sense. Moreover, the increasing risk (IR) or stop-loss order preserving property of the marginal CTE components holds for the class of bivariate Archimedean copulas. A counterexample to the (IR) property for the trivariate Clayton copula is included.

The importance of funded private or occupational old-age provision is expected to increase due to demographic changes and the resulting problems for government-run pay-as-you-go systems. Clients and advisors therefore need reliable methodologies to match offered products with clients' needs and risk appetite. In Graf et al. (2012), the authors have introduced a methodology based on stochastic modeling to properly assess the risk-return profiles — i.e. the probability distribution of future benefits — of various old-age provision products. In this paper, we additionally consider the impact of inflation on the risk-return profile of old-age provision products. In a model with stochastic interest rates, stochastic inflation and equity returns including stochastic equity volatility, we derive risk-return-profiles for various types of existing unit-linked products with and without embedded guarantees and especially focus on the difference between nominal and real returns. We find that typical “rule of thumb” approximations for considering inflation risk are inappropriate and further show that products that are considered particularly safe by practitioners because of nominal guarantees may bear significant inflation risk. Finally, we propose product designs suitable to reduce inflation risk and investigate their risk-return profile in real terms.

In this paper, we develop a theoretical basis for drawing up a “Swedish” type actuarial balance sheet for a defined benefit pay-as-you-go (DB PAYG) scheme with retirement and disability benefits. Our model enables us to obtain the system's expected average turnover duration, measure the scheme's solvency and explore the phenomenon identified as “pension reclassification”, a widespread practice that masks the system's real status unless further pension information becomes available. The model is clearly linked to actuarial practice in social security and gives partial support to the practical adaptation of Swedish methodology carried out by OSFI (2012) in applying the concept of the contribution asset to the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) balance sheet, which includes disability and survivor benefits.