Voluntary Termination of Life Insurance Policies

Abstract

In this paper, one error-correction model (ECM) that is able to avoid the problem of producing noise within traditional multiple cointegration vectors has been employed to explore the dynamics of surrender behavior. The evidence shows that both the emergency fund hypothesis and interest rate hypothesis are sustained in the short run as well as in the long run. A unique cointegration relationship within the surrender dynamics has been validated. In addition, a new hypothesis test that stresses the competition for the withdrawal of life insurance policy cash values has also been conducted. Such a crowding-out effect between policy loans and policy surrenders might be attributed to the motivation that keeps a life policy in force, the existence of surrender charges, and the automatic premium loan provision.     

Computation of Multivariate Barrier Crossing Probability and its Applications in Credit Risk Models

Abstract

In this paper we consider computational methods of finding exit probabilities for a class of multivariate diffusion processes. Although there is an abundance of results for one-dimensional diffusion processes, for multivariate processes one has to rely on approximations or simulation methods. We adopt a Large Deviations approach to approximate barrier crossing probabilities of a multivariate Brownian Bridge. We use this approach in conjunction with simulation methods to develop an efficient method of obtaining barrier crossing probabilities of a multivariate Brownian motion. Using numerical examples, we demonstrate that our method works better than other existing methods. We mainly focus on a three-dimensional process, but our framework can be extended to higher dimensions. We present two applications of the proposed method in credit risk modeling. First, we show that we can efficiently estimate the default probabilities of several correlated credit risky entities. Second, we use this method to efficiently price a credit default swap (CDS) with several correlated reference entities. In a conventional approach one normally adopts an arbitrary copula to capture dependency among counterparties. The method we propose allows us to incorporate the instantaneous variance-covariance structure of the underlying process into the CDS prices.