IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jrinsu/v81y2014i1p57-90.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Mortality Risk and Its Effect on Shortfall and Risk Management in Life Insurance

Author

Listed:
  • Nadine Gatzert
  • Hannah Wesker

Abstract

type="main" xml:lang="en"> Mortality risk is a key risk factor for life insurance companies and can have a crucial impact on its risk situation. In general, mortality risk can be divided into different subcategories, among them unsystematic risk, adverse selection, and systematic risk. In addition, basis risk may arise in case of hedging, for example, longevity risk. The aim of this article is to holistically analyze the impact of these different types of mortality risk on the risk situation and the risk management of a life insurer. Toward this end, we extend previous models of adverse selection, empirically calibrate mortality rates, and study the interaction among the mortality risk components in the case of an insurer holding a portfolio of annuities and term life insurance contracts. For risk management, we examine natural hedging and mortality contingent bonds. Our results show that particularly adverse selection and basis risk can have crucial impact not only on the effectiveness of mortality contingent bonds, but also on the insurer's risk level, especially when a portfolio consists of several types of products.

Suggested Citation

  • Nadine Gatzert & Hannah Wesker, 2014. "Mortality Risk and Its Effect on Shortfall and Risk Management in Life Insurance," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 81(1), pages 57-90, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jrinsu:v:81:y:2014:i:1:p:57-90
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Timothy F. Harris & Aaron Yelowitz, 2018. "Racial disparities in life insurance coverage," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(1), pages 94-107, January.
    2. David Blake & Marco Morales & Enrico Biffis & Yijia Lin & Andreas Milidonis, 2017. "Special Edition: Longevity 10 – The Tenth International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conference," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 84(S1), pages 515-532, April.
    3. Enrico Biffis & David Blake & Lorenzo Pitotti & Ariel Sun, 2016. "The Cost of Counterparty Risk and Collateralization in Longevity Swaps," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 83(2), pages 387-419, June.
    4. Torben M. Andersen & Marias H. Gestsson, 2021. "Annuitization and aggregate mortality risk," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 88(1), pages 79-99, March.
    5. Tat Wing Wong & Mei Choi Chiu & Hoi Ying Wong, 2017. "Managing Mortality Risk With Longevity Bonds When Mortality Rates Are Cointegrated," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 84(3), pages 987-1023, September.
    6. Andy Wong & Michael Sherris & Ralph Stevens, 2017. "Natural Hedging Strategies for Life Insurers: Impact of Product Design and Risk Measure," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 84(1), pages 153-175, March.
    7. Katja Schilling & Daniel Bauer & Marcus C. Christiansen & Alexander Kling, 2020. "Decomposing Dynamic Risks into Risk Components," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(12), pages 5738-5756, December.
    8. Michael McCrea & Mark Farrell, 2018. "A Conceptual Model for Pricing Health and Life Insurance Using Wearable Technology," Risk Management and Insurance Review, American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 21(3), pages 389-411, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jrinsu:v:81:y:2014:i:1:p:57-90. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ariaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.