We introduce an extension to Merton's famous continuous time model of optimal consumption and investment, in the spirit of previous works by Pliska and Ye, to allow for a wage earner to have a random lifetime and to use a portion of the income to purchase life insurance in order to provide for his estate, while investing his savings in a financial market comprised of one risk-free security and an arbitrary number of risky securities driven by multi-dimensional Brownian motion. We then provide a detailed analysis of the optimal consumption, investment, and insurance purchase strategies for the wage earner whose goal is to maximize the expected utility obtained from his family consumption, from the size of the estate in the event of premature death, and from the size of the estate at the time of retirement. We use dynamic programming methods to obtain explicit solutions for the case of discounted constant relative risk aversion utility functions and describe new analytical results which are presented together with the corresponding economic interpretations.
The aim of this paper is to solve an optimal investment, consumption and life insurance problem when the investor is restricted to capital guarantee. We consider an incomplete market described by a jump-diffusion model with stochastic volatility. Using the martingale approach, we prove the existence of the optimal strategy and the optimal martingale measure and we obtain the explicit solutions for the power utility functions.
In this paper, we study a stochastic optimal control problem with stochastic volatility. We prove the sufficient and necessary maximum principle for the proposed problem. Then we apply the results to solve an investment, consumption and life insurance problem with stochastic volatility, that is, we consider a wage earner investing in one risk-free asset and one risky asset described by a jump-diffusion process and has to decide concerning consumption and life insurance purchase. We assume that the life insurance for the wage earner is bought from a market composed of $M>1$ life insurance compa…
We consider an investor who wants to select her/his optimal consumption, investment and insurance policies. Motivated by new insurance products, we allow not only the financial marke but also the insurable loss to depend on the regime of the economy. The objective of the investor is to maximize her/his expected total discounted utility of consumption over an infinite time horizon. For the case of hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) utility functions, we obtain the first explicit solutions for simultaneous optimal consumption, investment, and insurance problems when there is regime switchi…
We discuss an optimal investment, consumption and insurance problem of a wage earner under inflation. Assume a wage earner investing in a real money account and three asset prices, namely: a real zero coupon bond, the inflation-linked real money account and a risky share described by jump-diffusion processes. Using the theory of quadratic-exponential backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) with jumps approach, we derive the optimal strategy for the two typical utilities (exponential and power) and the value function is characterized as a solution of BSDE with jumps. Finally, we derive…
This paper considers an optimal life insurance for a householder subject to mortality risk. The household receives a wage income continuously, which is terminated by unexpected (premature) loss of earning power or (planned and intended) retirement, whichever happens first. In order to hedge the risk of losing income stream by householder's unpredictable event, the household enters a life insurance contract by paying a premium to an insurance company. The household may also invest their wealth into a financial market. The problem is to determine an optimal insurance/investment/consumption strat…
We show how to solve Merton optimal investment stochastic control problem for Hawkes-based models in finance and insurance, i.e., for a wealth portfolio X(t) consisting of a bond and a stock price described by general compound Hawkes process (GCHP), and for a capital R(t) of an insurance company with the amount of claims described by the risk model based on GCHP. The novelty of the results consists of the new Hawkes-based models and in the new optimal investment results in finance and insurance for those models.
We determine how an individual can use life insurance to meet a bequest goal. We assume that the individual's consumption is met by an income, such as a pension, life annuity, or Social Security. Then, we consider the wealth that the individual wants to devote towards heirs (separate from any wealth related to the afore-mentioned income) and find the optimal strategy for buying life insurance to maximize the probability of reaching a given bequest goal. We consider life insurance purchased by a single premium, with and without cash value available. We also consider irreversible and reversible …
In this paper, we study an optimal reinsurance-investment problem in a risk model with two dependent classes of insurance business, where the two claim number processes are correlated through a common shock component. We assume that the insurer can purchase per-loss reinsurance for each line of business and invest its surplus in a financial market consisting of a risk-free asset and a risky asset. Under the criterion of minimizing the probability of drawdown, the closed-form expressions of the optimal reinsurance-investment strategy and the corresponding value function are obtained. We show th…
In this paper the utility optimization problem for a general insurance model is studied. The reserve process of the insurance company is described by a stochastic differential equation driven by a Brownian motion and a Poisson random measure, representing the randomness from the financial market and the insurance claims, respectively. The random safety loading and stochastic interest rates are allowed in the model so that the reserve process is non-Markovian in general. The insurance company can manage the reserves through both portfolios of the investment and a reinsurance policy to optimize …
This paper studies a Value-at-Risk (VaR)-regulated optimal portfolio problem of the equity holders of a participating life insurance contract. In a setting with unhedgeable mortality risk and complete financial market, the optimal solution is given explicitly for contracts with mortality risk using a martingale approach for constrained non-concave optimization problems. We show that regulatory VaR constraints for participating insurance contracts lead to more prudent investment than in the case of no regulation. This result is contrary to the situation where the insurer maximizes the utility o…
All the financial practitioners are working in incomplete markets full of unhedgeable risk-factors. Making the situation worse, they are only equipped with the imperfect information on the relevant processes. In addition to the market risk, fund and insurance managers have to be prepared for sudden and possibly contagious changes in the investment flows from their clients so that they can avoid the over- as well as under-hedging. In this work, the prices of securities, the occurrences of insured events and (possibly a network of) the investment flows are used to infer their drifts and intensit…
We study optimal proportional reinsurance and investment strategies for an insurance company which experiences both ordinary and catastrophic claims and wishes to maximize the expected exponential utility of its terminal wealth. We propose a model where the insurance framework is affected by environmental factors, and aggregate claims and stock prices are subject to common shocks, i.e. drastic events such as earthquakes, extreme weather conditions, or even pandemics, that have an immediate impact on the financial market and simultaneously induce insurance claims. Using the classical stochastic…
We consider in this paper the optimal dividend problem for an insurance company whose uncontrolled reserve process evolves as a classical Cramér--Lundberg process. The firm has the option of investing part of the surplus in a Black--Scholes financial market. The objective is to find a strategy consisting of both investment and dividend payment policies which maximizes the cumulative expected discounted dividend pay-outs until the time of bankruptcy. We show that the optimal value function is the smallest viscosity solution of the associated second-order integro-differential Hamilton--Jacobi--B…
In this paper we study the optimal investment and reinsurance problem of an insurance company whose investment preferences are described via a forward dynamic exponential utility in a regime-switching market model. Financial and actuarial frameworks are dependent since stock prices and insurance claims vary according to a common factor given by a continuous time finite state Markov chain. We construct the value function and we prove that it is a forward dynamic utility. Then, we characterize the investment strategy and the optimal proportional level of reinsurance. We also perform numerical ex…
This paper researches the problem of purchasing deferred term insurance in the context of financial planning to maximize the probability of achieving a personal financial goal. Specifically, our study starts from the perspective of hedging death risk and longevity risk, and considers the purchase of deferred term life insurance and deferred term pure endowment to achieve a given financial goal for the first time in both deterministic and stochastic framework. In particular, we consider income, consumption and risky investment in the stochastic framework, extending previous results in \cite{Bay…
Limited liability creates a conflict of interests between policyholders and shareholders of insurance companies. It provides shareholders with incentives to increase the risk of the insurer's assets and liabilities which, in turn, might reduce the value policyholders attach to and premiums they are willing to pay for insurance coverage. We characterize Pareto optimal investment and premium policies in this context and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence and uniqueness. We then identify investment and premium policies under the risk shifting problem if shareholders c…
We determine the optimal amount of life insurance for a household of two wage earners. We consider the simple case of exponential utility, thereby removing wealth as a factor in buying life insurance, while retaining the relationship among life insurance, income, and the probability of dying and thus losing that income. For insurance purchased via a single premium or premium payable continuously, we explicitly determine the optimal death benefit. We show that if the premium is determined to target a specific probability of loss per policy, then the rates of consumption are identical under sing…
We study the optimal investment and proportional reinsurance problem of an insurance company, whose investment preferences are described via a forward dynamic utility of exponential type in a stochastic factor model allowing for a possible dependence between the financial and insurance markets. Specifically, we assume that the asset price process dynamics and the claim arrival intensity are both affected by a common stochastic process and we account for a possible environmental contagion effect through the non-zero correlation parameter between the underlying Brownian motions driving the asset…
We study a continuous-time asset-allocation problem for an insurance firm that backs up liabilities from multiple non-life business lines with underwriting profits and investment income. The insurance risks are captured via a multidimensional jump-diffusion process with a multivariate compound Poisson process with dependent components, which allows to model claims that occur in different lines simultaneously. Using Lagrangian convex duality techniques, we provide a general verification-type result for investment-underwriting strategies that maximize expected utility from the dividend payout ra…
We study an optimal dividend problem for an insurer who simultaneously controls investment weights in a financial market, liability ratio in the insurance business, and dividend payout rate. The insurer seeks an optimal strategy to maximize her expected utility of dividend payments over an infinite horizon. By applying a perturbation approach, we obtain the optimal strategy and the value function in closed form for log and power utility. We conduct an economic analysis to investigate the impact of various model parameters and risk aversion on the insurer's optimal strategy.
We determine the optimal strategies for purchasing term life insurance and for investing in a risky financial market in order to maximize the probability of reaching a bequest goal while consuming from an investment account. We extend Bayraktar and Young (2015) by allowing the individual to purchase term life insurance to reach her bequest goal. The premium rate for life insurance, $h$, serves as a parameter to connect two seemingly unrelated problems. As the premium rate approaches $0$, covering the bequest goal becomes costless, so the individual simply wants to avoid ruin that might result …
We study an optimal investment control problem for an insurance company. The surplus process follows the Cramer-Lundberg process with perturbation of a Brownian motion. The company can invest its surplus into a risk free asset and a Black-Scholes risky asset. The optimization objective is to minimize the probability of ruin. We show by new operators that the minimal ruin probability function is a classical solution to the corresponding HJB equation. Asymptotic behaviors of the optimal investment control policy and the minimal ruin probability function are studied for low surplus levels with a …
Previous studies into the budget constraint of portfolio optimization problems based on statistical mechanical informatics have not considered that the purchase cost per unit of each asset is distinct. Moreover, the fact that the optimal investment allocation differs depending on the size of investable funds has also been neglected. In this paper, we approach the problem of investment risk minimization using replica analysis. This problem imposes cost and return constraints. We also derive the macroscopic theory indicated by the optimal solution and confirm the validity of our proposed method …
In this paper, we assume an insure is allowed to purchase proportional reinsurance and can invest his or her wealth into the financial market where a savings account, stocks and bonds are available. Different from classical optimal investment and reinsurance problem, this paper studies the insurer's long-term investment decision. Under this setting, our model consider the interest risk and the inflation risk. Specifically, we suppose the interest rate follows a stochastic process, while price index is described by a classical model. By solving Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, the closed-form …
We consider an insurance company whose surplus is represented by the classical Cramer-Lundberg process. The company can invest its surplus in a risk free asset and in a risky asset, governed by the Black-Scholes equation. There is a constraint that the insurance company can only invest in the risky asset at a limited leveraging level; more precisely, when purchasing, the ratio of the investment amount in the risky asset to the surplus level is no more than a; and when shortselling, the proportion of the proceeds from the short-selling to the surplus level is no more than b. The objective is to…
The aim of this paper is to introduce a synthetic ALM model that catches the main specificity of life insurance contracts. First, it keeps track of both market and book values to apply the regulatory profit sharing rule. Second, it introduces a determination of the crediting rate to policyholders that is close to the practice and is a trade-off between the regulatory rate, a competitor rate and the available profits. Third, it considers an investment in bonds that enables to match a part of the cash outflow due to surrenders, while avoiding to store the trading history. We use this model to ev…
In this article we solve the problem of maximizing the expected utility of future consumption and terminal wealth to determine the optimal pension or life-cycle fund strategy for a cohort of pension fund investors. The setup is strongly related to a DC pension plan where additionally (individual) consumption is taken into account. The consumption rate is subject to a time-varying minimum level and terminal wealth is subject to a terminal floor. Moreover, the preference between consumption and terminal wealth as well as the intertemporal coefficient of risk aversion are time-varying and therefo…
This paper studies the problem of optimal investment in incomplete markets, robust with respect to stopping times. We work on a Brownian motion framework and the stopping times are adapted to the Brownian filtration. Robustness can only be achieved for logartihmic utility, otherwise a cashflow should be added to the investor s wealth. The cashflow can be decomposed into the sum of an increasing and a decreasing process. The last one can be viewed as consumption. The first one is an insurance premium the agent has to pay.
