Suchergebnisse

Worldwide demographic changes and their implications for governments, corporations, and individuals have been in the focus of public interest for quite some time due to the fiscal risk related to adequate retirement benefits. Through a more detailed analysis of mortality data an additional type of risk can be identified: differences in mortality improvements by birth year, also known as "cohort effects." Previous contributions have, however, not formalized a suitable measure to further investigate mortality improvements but rather relied on graphical representations without particular focus on individual cohorts but groups of the overall population. No criterion to identify single birth year cohorts as select has been established. A simple criterion for identifying select cohorts is proposed and used here to what country mortality data reveals about the mortality and longevity experience of cohorts. Select cohorts are rare but can be quite different from surrounding cohorts and so may generate financial risks that need to be hedged naturally or artificially with new ART instruments.

Longevity risk has become a major challenge for governments, individuals, and annuity providers in most countries, and especially its aggregate form, i.e. the risk of unsystematic changes to general mortality patterns, bears a large potential for accumulative losses for insurers. As obvious risk management tools such as (re)insurance or hedging are less suited to manage an annuity provider's exposure to aggregate longevity risk, the current paper proposes a new type of life annuities with benefits contingent on actual mortality experience, and it also details actuarial aspects of implementation. Similar adaptations to conventional product design exist in investment-linked annuities, and a role model for long-term contracts contingent on actual cost experience is found in German private health insurance so that the idea is not novel in general, but it is in the context of longevity risk. By not or re-transferring the systematic longevity risk insurers may avoid accumulative losses so that the primary focus in an extensive Monte-Carlo simulation is on the question of whether and to what extent such products are also advantageous for policyholders in contrast to a comparable conventional annuity product.

Life annuities provide a guaranteed income for the remainder of the recipient's lifetime, and therefore, annuitization represents an important option when choosing an adequate investment strategy for the retirement period. While there are numerous scientific articles studying annuities from the pensioner's point of view, thus far, there have been few contributions considering annuities from the provider's perspective. In particular, there are no surveys on the general risks within annuity books.The present paper aims at filling this gap: Using a simulation framework, it provides a longterm analysis of the risks within annuity books. More specifically, the mutual as well as the respective impacts of systematic mortality risk and investment risk on the insurer's financial situation are studied.The key finding is that under the model specifications and using annuity data from the United Kingdom, the risk premium charged for longevity risk seems to be very high relative to its characteristics. Possible explanations as well as economic implications are provided, and potential caveats are discussed.