This paper updates Living with Mortality published in 2006. It describes how the longevity risk transfer market has developed over the intervening period, and, in particular, how insurance-based solutions – buy-outs, buy-ins and longevity insurance – have triumphed over capital markets solutions that were expected to dominate at the time. Some capital markets solutions – longevity-spread bonds, longevity swaps, q-forwards and tail-risk protection – have come to market, but the volume of business has been disappointingly low. The reason for this is that when market participants compare the index-based solutions of the capital markets with the customised solutions of insurance companies in terms of basis risk, credit risk, regulatory capital, collateral and liquidity, the former perform on balance less favourably despite a lower potential cost. We discuss the importance of stochastic mortality models for forecasting future longevity and examine some applications of these models, e.g. determining the longevity risk premium and estimating regulatory capital relief. The longevity risk transfer market is now beginning to recognise that there is insufficient capacity in the insurance and reinsurance industries to deal fully with demand and new solutions for attracting capital markets investors are now being examined – such as longevity-linked securities and reinsurance sidecars.

Although longevity risk arises from both the variation surrounding the trend in future mortality and the uncertainty about the trend itself, the latter is often left unmodeled. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing the locally linear CBD model, in which the drifts that govern the expected mortality trend are allowed to follow a stochastic process. This specification results in median forecasts that are more consistent with the recent trends and more robust relative to changes in the data sample period. It also yields wider prediction intervals that may better reflect the possibilities of future trend changes. The treatment of the drifts as a stochastic process naturally calls for nuga hedging, a method proposed by Cairns (2013) to hedge the risk associated with changes in drifts. To improve the existing nuga-hedging method, we propose a new hedging method which demands less stringent assumptions. The proposed method allows hedgers to extract more hedge effectiveness out of a hedging instrument, and is therefore useful when there are only a few traded longevity securities in the market.

When hedging longevity risk with standardized contracts, the hedger needs to calibrate the hedge carefully so that it can effectively reduce the risk. In this article, we present a calibration method that is based on matching mortality rate sensitivities. Specifically, we introduce a measure called key q-duration, which allows us to estimate the price sensitivity of a life-contingent liability to each portion of the underlying mortality curve. Given this measure, one can easily construct a longevity hedge with a small number of q-forward contracts. We further propose an extension for hedging the longevity risk associated with multiple birth cohorts, and another extension for accommodating population basis risk.