The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features, assumed a long-term perspective, and exercised their own subjective, expert judgment. However, the new EU regulatory regime of Solvency II (S2) has come to require market-consistent valuation supplemented by a risk-sensitive capital. This is considered an unwanted shift towards short-termism that is misaligned with the industry's long term and countercyclical character. The new principles place the ‘technicalising’ logic of financial economics over ‘contextualising’ actuarial know-how. Following existing analytics of valuation from the ethnography of reinsurance markets and the social studies of finance, such requirements appear either as an alarming attack against the actuarial component of traditional valuation practice, or else as a preserver of it, through a process of enfolding at the heart of the financialisation project. This article holds that the case of S2 challenges both these analytics of valuation. S2’s financialisation project, precisely by attempting to construct itself, deconstructs itself into an actuarial project, in a recurring, aporetic process. In this respect, fair (or otherwise) valuation remains always undecidable, inconclusive, and thus responsible.

In this paper, we introduce the 3-step hedge-based valuation for the valuation of hybrid claims. We consider an insurance portfolio which is exposed to traded risks, diversifiable risks and non-traded systematic risks. The class of 3-step hedge-based valuations is equivalent with the class of fair valuations. Closed-form solutions are derived for a portfolio of unit-linked contracts under the assumption of independence between financial and non-financial risks. We also consider the additive 3-step valuation and show that this additive valuation is a member of the more general class of 3-step hedge-based valuations.

This paper proposes a shift in the valuation and production of long-term annuities, away from the classical risk-neutral methodology towards a methodology using the real-world probability measure. The proposed production method is applied to three examples of annuity products, one having annual payments linked to a mortality index and the savings account and the others having annual payments linked to a mortality index and an equity index with a guarantee that is linked to the same mortality index and the savings account. Out-of-sample hedge simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed less-expensive production method. In contrast to classical risk-neutral production, which revolves around the savings account as reference unit, the long-term best-performing portfolio, the numéraire portfolio of the equity market, is employed as the fundamental reference unit in the production of the annuity. The numéraire portfolio is the strictly positive, tradable portfolio that when used as denominator or benchmark makes all benchmarked non-negative portfolios supermartingales. Under real-world valuation, the initial benchmarked value of a benchmarked contingent claim equals its real-world conditional expectation. The proposed real-world valuation and production can lead to significantly lower values of long-term annuities and their less-expensive production than suggested by the risk-neutral approach.

Financial products are priced using risk-neutral expectations justified by hedging portfolios that (as accurate as possible) match the product’s payoff. In insurance, premium calculations are based on a real-world best-estimate value plus a risk premium. The insurance risk premium is typically reduced by pooling of (in the best case) independent contracts. As hybrid life insurance contracts depend on both financial and insurance risks, their valuation requires a hybrid valuation principle that combines the two concepts of financial and actuarial valuation. The aim of this paper is to present a novel three-step projection algorithm to valuate hybrid contracts by decomposing their payoff in three parts: a financial, hedgeable part, a diversifiable actuarial part, and a residual part that is neither hedgeable nor diversifiable. The first two parts of the resulting premium are directly linked to their corresponding hedging and diversification strategies, respectively. The method allows for a separate treatment of unsystematic, diversifiable mortality risk and systematic, aggregate mortality risk related to, for example, epidemics or population-wide improvements in life expectancy. We illustrate our method in the case of CAT bonds and a pure endowment insurance contract with profit and compare the three-step method to alternative valuation operators suggested in the literature.

Delong et al. (2018) presented a theory of fair (market-consistent and actuarial) valuation of insurance liability cash-flow streams in continuous time. In this paper, we investigate in detail two practical applications of our theory of fair valuation. In the first example, we consider the fair valuation of a terminal benefit which is contingent on correlated tradeable and non-tradeable financial risks. In the second example, we consider a portfolio of unit-linked contracts contingent on a non-tradeable insurance and a tradeable financial risk. We derive partial differential equations (PDEs) which characterize the continuous-time fair valuation operators in these two examples and we find explicit solutions to these PDEs. The fair values of the liabilities are decomposed into the best estimate of the liability and a risk margin. The arbitrage-free representations of the fair values of the liabilities are derived and the dynamic hedging strategies associated with the continuous-time fair valuation operators are also established. Detailed interpretations of the results, which should be useful both for researchers and practitioners, are provided.

Among the systems in place in different countries for the protection of the population against the long-term contingencies of old-age (or retirement), disability and death (or survivorship), defined-benefit social security pension schemes, i.e. social insurance pension schemes, by far predominate, despite the recent trend towards defined-contribution arrangements in social security reforms. Actuarial valuations of these schemes, unlike other branches of insurance, continue to be carried out almost exclusively on traditional, deterministic lines. Stochastic applications in this area, which have been restricted mainly to occasional special studies, have relied on the simulation technique. This paper develops an analytical model for the stochastic actuarial valuation of a social insurance pension scheme. Formulae are developed for the expected values, variances and covariances of and among the benefit expenditure and salary bill projections and their discounted values, allowing for stochastic variation in three key input factors, i.e., mortality, new entrant intake, and interest (net of salary escalation). Each deterministic output of the valuation is thus supplemented with a confidence interval, that is, a range with an attached probability. The treatment covers the premiums under the different possible financial systems for these schemes, which differ from the funding methods of private pensions, as well as the testing of the level of the Fund ratio when the future contributions schedule is pre-determined. Although it is based on a relatively simplified approach and refers only to retirement pensions, with full adjustment in line with salary escalation, the paper brings out the stochastic features of pension scheme projections and illustrates a comprehensive stochastic valuation. It is hoped that the paper will stimulate interest in further research, both of a theoretical and a practical nature, and lead to progressively increasing recourse to stochastic methods in social insurance pension scheme valuations.

Sensitivity analysis, or so-called ‘stress-testing’, has long been part of the actuarial contribution to pricing, reserving and management of capital levels in both life and non-life assurance. Recent developments in the area of derivatives pricing have seen the application of adjoint methods to the calculation of option price sensitivities including the well-known ‘Greeks’ or partial derivatives of option prices with respect to model parameters. These methods have been the foundation for efficient and simple calculations of a vast number of sensitivities to model parameters in financial mathematics. This methodology has yet to be applied to actuarial problems in insurance or in pensions. In this paper we consider a model for a defined benefit pension scheme and use adjoint methods to illustrate the sensitivity of fund valuation results to key inputs such as mortality rates, interest rates and levels of salary rate inflation. The method of adjoints is illustrated in the paper and numerical results are presented. Efficient calculation of the sensitivity of key valuation results to model inputs is useful information for practising actuaries as it provides guidance as to the relative ultimate importance of various judgments made in the formation of a liability valuation basis.

A recent survey of actuarial practitioners in North America shows that smoothed-market actuarial asset values are commonly used in funding valuations of defined benefit pension plans. Four methods of calculating such values are reported in the actuarial literature but only qualitative descriptions of the methods are given. This paper provides mathematical descriptions of the “average of market”, “weighted average”, “deferred recognition” and “write-up” actuarial values. They are shown to be based on either arithmetic or exponential smoothing. Provided the same form of smoothing is used, the four methods are equivalent.

An assumption concerning the long-term rate of return on assets is made by actuaries when they value defined-benefit pension plans. There is a distinction between this assumption and the discount rate used to value pension liabilities, as the value placed on liabilities does not depend on asset allocation in the pension fund. The more conservative the investment return assumption is, the larger planned initial contributions are, and the faster benefits are funded. A conservative investment return assumption, however, also leads to long-term surpluses in the plan, as is shown for two practical actuarial funding methods. Long-term deficits result from an optimistic assumption. Neither outcome is desirable as, in the long term, pension plan assets should be accumulated to meet the pension liabilities valued at a suitable discount rate. A third method is devised that avoids such persistent surpluses and deficits regardless of conservatism or optimism in the assumed investment return.