Volume 11, Issue 1 -

Applying a well-known argument of Karl Menger to an insurance version of the St. Petersburg Paradox (in which the decision maker is confronted with losses, rather than gains), one can assert that von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions are necessarily concave upward and bounded below as decision-maker wealth tends to negative infinity. However, this argument is subject to two potential criticisms: (1) infinite-mean losses do not exist in the real world; and (2) the St. Petersburg Paradox derives its force from empirical observation (i. e., that actual decision makers would not agree to an arbitrarily large insurance bid price to transfer an infinite-mean loss), and thus does not impart logical necessity. In the present article, these two criticisms are addressed in turn. We first show that, although infinite-mean insurance losses technically do not exist, they do provide a reasonable model for certain large (i. e., excess and reinsurance) property-liability indemnities. We then employ the Two-Envelope Paradox to demonstrate the logical necessity of concave-upward, lower-bounded utility for arbitrarily small (i. e., negative) values of wealth. Finally, we note that recognizing the bounded, sigmoid nature of utility functions challenges certain fundamental understandings in the economics of insurance demand, and can lead to vastly different conclusions regarding the bid price for insurance.

Population aging and a shrinking workforce creates a significant drag on opportunities for economic growth. Specifically, many economies in Asia will see their demographic windows of economic opportunity close within the next two decades or so. One widely explored policy response among governments has been to encourage longer working lives or delay retirement. This paper traces developments in retirement age policies for rapidly aging Asian economies, and investigates the effect of recent reforms in old-age employment practices on their demographic windows. We find that increases in retirement age based on current policy prescriptions can help these aging economies extend their demographic windows by another two to seven years. Nonetheless, further extensions to working lives are needed to help sustain economic expansion and to provide support for growing elderly populations. Our study also demonstrates that the extent of the time gains from retirement age increases vary depending on how the age structures in each economy is expected to evolve over time. Accordingly, the timing and quantum of future retirement age increases should be suitably calibrated so as to sufficiently offset declines in the working-age population.

This study explores the strategy of value investing, specifically for the insurance industry in Thailand. It employs multiple measures of “value,” suitable for insurance companies, such as the price-to-earning (PE), price-to-book (PB), and cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE). Value premium exists in the Thai insurance industry, and most of the value portfolios constructed from these measures significantly outperform the market, even when adjusting for price volatility and portfolio’s β$\beta $. The cumulative returns are also higher for the value stocks, when compared to the growth stocks, and the Thai stock market. Constructing a value portfolio, using the PE ratio, results in the highest returns and is far better than PB and CAPE. The value anomaly cannot be fully explained by either the capital asset pricing model or the Fama-French three-factor models.

Copulas can be a useful tool to capture heavy-tailed dependence between risks in estimating economic capital. This paper provides a procedure of combining copula with GARCH model to construct a multivariate distribution. The copula-based GARCH model using a skewed student’s t-distribution controls for the issues of skewness, heavy tails, volatility clustering and conditional dependencies contained in the financial time series data. Using the sample of U.S. property liability insurance industry, we perform Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the insurer’s economic capital measured by Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). The result indicates that the choice of dependence structure and business mix between asset classes and liability lines has a significant impact on the resulting capital requirements and diversification benefits. We find the incremental diversification benefit in terms of a reduction in the total capital requirement from the joint modeling of underwriting risk and market risk compared to the modeling of market risk only.

In a conventional fixed annuity, idiosyncratic risk is diversified away while systematic longevity risk is borne entirely by the provider. The mortality-indexed annuity on the other hand, transfers systematic longevity risk completely back to the annuitants by fully adjusting benefits to mortality experience. In this paper, we propose the partial mortality-indexed annuity (PMIA), which aims to seek a balance between the two ends of the risk-sharing spectrum. Through a simulation study, we show that the PMIA achieves risk sharing and benefits both the provider and the annuitant.