Description: An insurance company starts with an initial surplus, collects premium, pays claims to policyholders and pays dividends to stockholders. What remains is the following year’s surplus. The process continues. This paper describes how to calculate the distribution of surplus for any given year. With these distributions, one can make the calculations of premiums and dividends.

Description: This paper presents a multi-state stochastic model for analyzing continuing care retirement community CCRC populations. The model considers CCRCs with a number of independent living units and a skilled nursing facility. Residents may transfer temporarily or permanently to this facility. It is assumed that units vacated by deaths, withdrawals or permanent transfers are immediately occupied by new residents. Transfers are modeled using a time-homogeneous Markov process. The paper provides some probabilistic results and some numerical results obtained using this model. Some important generalizations of the model are also briefly discussed.

Description: This paper presents a methodology of pricing the guaranteed minimum death benefit of a variable annuity in a market model with jumps. Recent developments in the stock market make variable annuities very attractive products from the insured point of view, but less attractive for insurers. The insured still has the possibility of investment benefits, while avoiding the risk of a stock market collapse. The insurer wants to minimize its risk and yet sell a competitive product. The financial market model consists of one riskless asset and one risky asset whose price jumps in proportions J at some random times T which correspond to the jump times of a Poisson process. The model describes incomplete markets and there is no perfect hedging. In the second part of the paper, we describe a possible method of risk analysis for binomial tree models.

Description: This paper discusses the theoretic framework of modeling captial markets: index-based composition methodology and statisical procedure of model construction and extension: wavelets-based financial signal processing technique. It also discusses the implications and applications, measuring the market uncertainty and volatility highlighting the S&P 500 as an example.

Description: In a stochastic world consideration of only a few deterministic scenarios can potentially be dangerous. The aim of the present research is to study the computation of the cost of mismatch using stochastic interest rate models instead of scenario testing. In this paper, two commonly used Stochastic interest rate models are considered: the one introduced by Vasicek 1977 and the one proposed by Cox, Ingersoll and Ross 1985.

Description: In a series papers by Willmot and Lin, both exponential and non-exponential bounds for the tail probability of various compound distributions have been derived. In Wilmot, it was suggested that non-exponential bounds for the ruin probability were difficult to obtain using martingale arguments. In this note, we show how to use martingale inequalities to obtain some upper bounds for the ruin probability.

Description: We propose asymptotically correct two-sided bounds for random sums where the number of summands has an arbitrary distribution which can be viewed as ruin probabilities or accumulated claim sizes in various risk processes. The bounds are fairly new and they reveal the real accuracy of some well-known and widely used asymptotic formulas. It turns out that this accuracy can be poor and the range where these formulas give appropriate approximations depends on the shape of the tail distribution of the summands. This dependence is examined in the research.

Description: This article investigates the simplicity of the Balducci hypothesis, and compares the fractional-age death probability given by three widely used assumptions: uniform distribution of deaths, the Balducci hypothesis, and constant force of mortality [1, 2].

Description: In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of the Lee-Carter mortality index parameter kt. Specifically, we perform statistical hypothesis tests to examine whether the mortality indexes for Canada, England and Wales and the United States are best described by stochastic trends difference stationary models or deterministic trends trend stationary models. The empirical results favor broken-trend stationary models over difference stationary models, which are used in most previous applications of the Lee-Carter method. The results also give strong statistical evidence that the rates of mortality decline for the three populations have significantly accelerated in mid-1970s.

Description: In this paper we discuss some properties of the nth stop-loss order and their application in risk premium principles. We give a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for nth stop-loss orders. They are convenient tools to construct risk pairs with nth stop-loss orders. We show that exponential premium principles can diferentiate between losses more finely than the net premium principles under some conditions.