Description: Securitization of mortality risks is an alternative risk management tool that may have some advantages over reinsurance. The purpose of this paper is to study mortality-based securities, such as swaps and mortality bonds, and to price the proposed mortality securities. We focus on group life annuity data, although the techniques could be applied to other lines of annuity or life insurance.

Description: This paper investigates the use of models of dependent mortality for determining annuity values. We discuss a broad class of parametric models using a bivariate survivorship function called a copula. Using data from a large insurance company to illustrate our methods, we calculate maximum likelihood estimates to calibrate the rnodel.

Description: Recurrence relations arise naturally in life contingencies for 2 reasons - the aggregate law of mortality, which relates the distribution of the future life times of 2 insureds, if one of them and the other is that most life insurance products can be constructed as a portfolio of 2 basic product types. We use the above simple idea and the extra freedom provided by the fractional age distribution to reveal a structure behind some common recursions. The structure has obvious pedagogical value. More interestingly, a software based on it has been implemented which facilitates actuarial computing.

Description: In this paper we shall present our results in terms of the estimation of human mortality rates, but the results carry over to other applications. We shall discuss a Bayesian model that encompasses both graduation [smoothing] and prediction.

Description: The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utilize natural hedging have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging to a firm that writes only one of the lines of business.

Description: We employ a framework for the classification of mortality evolution patterns to HMD data. We find both supra-regional patterns and outliers from global trends.