Volume 16, Issue 1

In the present paper, we propose death benefits be directly embedded in retirement products to promote their attractiveness, where annuities and tontines are used as representative retirement products. As we assume that the death benefits will be passed on to the heirs of policyholders, these benefits can be considered as bequests. We find that both from the policyholders’ and insurers’ perspective, embedding bequests directly in the retirement products can increase the attractiveness of the retirement products and promote their sale. From the insurers’ perspective, without including death benefits, the insurers play purely an administrative role in a tontine product, while adding the bequest benefits makes the tontines real insurance products and incentivizes the insurers to actively provide these innovative retirement products. Further, adding the bequest benefits upon the death of the policyholder, some natural hedging is incorporated in the survival payments, which reduces the solvency capital the insurers are required to set aside.

This study examines the potential impact of aging on the demand for private health insurance (PHI) in China. Using the provincial data for 2000–2018, we find that a 1-percent increase in each proportion of the elderly population and old-age dependency ratio increases the PHI demand by 4.8 and 5.2%, respectively. A one-percent increase in the child dependency ratio decreases the PHI demand by 1.5%. We employ an instrumental variable approach; the findings support that the proportion of the elderly individuals in the total population, old-age dependency ratio, child dependency ratio, and urban green area significantly affect the PHI demand. The rolling estimate indicates that aging has a significant positive effect on the PHI demand over a rolling window of a fixed sample size. Additionally, by controlling for province and year fixed effects, we find that aging is positively associated with the PHI demand in China.

This study surveys 622 Bangladeshi civil servants of all administrative jurisdictions and elicits their preference for health insurance schemes. The latter vary in the amount of sum assured as well as in terms of premium sharing rules with the government. The paper also explores the financial burden that the premium subsidy may impose on the exchequer and the state’s fiscal capacity to shoulder it. We discover a very high willingness to join the scheme. Though all three premium-sharing options posit flat rates common for all employment ranks, respondents appear to prefer premiums proportional to their basic salary.

This paper proposes a stochastic multi-period pricing model based on the default option value with insurance cycle to examine the interactions among pricing, surplus allocation and solvency for a multiline insurer. The proposed innovative model captures the dynamic aspects of capitalization and the impact of dynamic premium setting on the insurer’s solvency and risk management. We derived the equilibrium premium for different insurance contract designs. Our results show that the allocation of surplus per line affects the default of the other lines and depends on the correlation between the solvency ratio and the loss ratio of the line. The presence of the insurance cycle can boost solvency provided that the insurer adopts the right underwriting strategy. Based on the correlation between the solvency ratio and the loss ratio of the line, the insurer can make strategic decision about fair pricing. This makes it possible to reconcile the objectives of pricing with the insurer’s solvency and its strategic decision-making in a long-term perspective.