The Poisson Log-Bilinear Lee-Carter Model

Abstract

Life insurance companies deal with two fundamental types of risks when issuing annuity contracts: financial risk and demographic risk. Recent work on the latter has focused on modeling the trend in mortality as a stochastic process. A popular method for modeling death rates is the Lee-Carter model. This methodology has become widely used, and various extensions and modifications have been proposed to obtain a broader interpretation and to capture the main features of the dynamics of mortality rates. In order to improve the measurement of uncertainty in survival probability estimates, in particular for older ages, the paper proposes an extension based on simulation procedures and on the bootstrap methodology. It aims to obtain more reliable and accurate mortality projections, based on the idea of obtaining an acceptable accuracy of the estimate by means of variance reducing techniques. In this way the forecasting procedure becomes more efficient. The longevity question constitutes a critical element in the solvency appraisal of pension annuities. The demographic models used for the cash flow distributions in a portfolio impact on the mathematical reserve and surplus calculations and affect the risk management choices for a pension plan. The paper extends the investigation of the impact of survival uncertainty for life annuity portfolios and for a guaranteed annuity option in the case where interest rates are stochastic. In a framework in which insurance companies need to use internal models for risk management purposes and for determining their solvency capital requirement, the authors consider the surplus value, calculated as the ratio between the market value of the projected assets to that of the liabilities, as a meaningful measure of the company’s financial position, expressing the degree to which the liabilities are covered by the assets.     

How state influence on project work organization both drives and mitigates gendered precarity in cultural and creative industries

This article develops an understanding of gendered precarity in project work by considering how the transfer of risk from employer to worker is shaped by the contextual pressures of state policy and the organization of the industrial field. The focus is the organization of project work as a condition underpinning the shifting of this risk in a mature field of precarious employment, the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Our empirical exploration in Film/TV in the UK and Germany, and Dance in Sweden and the Netherlands, examines the dynamic interplay between state policy domains (cultural, social and regulatory), industry-level funding bodies or ‘transaction organizers’ and the cultural processes of CCI project networks. We argue that state-led influences both drive and mitigate the transfer of risk in project work as gendered, racialized and classed. Our framework contributes to broadening employment literature on risk and the disadvantaging capacity of networks to hoard opportunities in project-based labour markets.     

Detecting Common Longevity Trends by a Multiple Population Approach

Recently the interest in the development of country and longevity risk models has been growing. The investigation of long-run equilibrium relationships could provide valuable information about the factors driving changes in mortality, in particular across ages and across countries. In order to investigate cross-country common longevity trends, tools to quantify, compare, and model the strength of dependence become essential. On one hand, it is necessary to take into account either the dependence for adjacent age groups or the dependence structure across time in a single population setting—a sort of intradependence structure. On the other hand, the dependence across multiple populations, which we describe as interdependence, can be explored for capturing common long-run relationships between countries. The objective of our work is to produce longevity projections by taking into account the presence of various forms of cross-sectional and temporal dependencies in the error processes of multiple populations, considering mortality data from different countries. The algorithm that we propose combines model-based predictions in the Lee-Carter (LC) framework with a bootstrap procedure for dependent data, and so both the historical parametric structure and the intragroup error correlation structure are preserved. We introduce a model which applies a sieve bootstrap to the residuals of the LC model and is able to reproduce, in the sampling, the dependence structure of the data under consideration. In the current article, the algorithm that we build is applied to a pool of populations by using ideas from panel data; we refer to this new algorithm as the Multiple Lee-Carter Panel Sieve (MLCPS). We are interested in estimating the relationship between populations of similar socioeconomic conditions. The empirical results show that the MLCPS approach works well in the presence of dependence.     

Chinese ODI in Italy: an empirical investigation at the firm-level

This paper provides original evidence about Chinese Outward Direct Investments in Italy. Data have been collected at the micro level, through a multiple-choice questionnaire, designed by the author and submitted to the whole population of Dragon multinationals. With a response rate of 86%, we draw a detailed profile of Chinese parent companies and document their pull, push factors, and entry mode strategies. Empirical findings are consistent with the theoretical literature.     

The New Division of Labor in the Globalized Economy: Women’s Challenges and Opportunities

The way in which the new international division of labor (NIDL) in the globalized economy affects gender inequalities has not been sufficiently explored yet. The body of literature on commodity chains that has attempted to assess the welfare effects of the NIDL, especially in less developed countries, has paid sparse attention to gender issues. Globalization has entailed the deverticalization of commodity supply chains and the emergence of highly concentrated financial groups and transnational companies linked to a network of firms operating as affiliates and suppliers, namely the global commodity chains. The NIDL could worsen gender inequality, due to the particular organizational strategies in global commodity chains that privilege power, instead of trust and market exchange, as the major form of governance and means for resource allocation. Because women represent the poorest swathe of the world’s population, they suffer the most from the growing wealth inequality and the concentration of power produced by the NIDL. Moreover, because of the traditional sexual division of labor and because of their low status in society, women are the most harshly exploited subjects in the system. The general conclusion of the paper is that in the NIDL the main means of resource allocation are not competitive markets, as often suggested by the GCV literature and mainstream economics, but are instead power relations that ultimately stem from the patriarchal culture of violence and domination.     

La polarización del empleo en Europa desde una perspectiva sectorial

La autora se centra en la polarización del empleo y proporciona evidencia para explicar los patrones de variación ocupacional sobre la base de cuatro macrogrupos de la CIUO según el nivel de calificación. Adoptando un enfoque estructural y sectorial, y mediante un análisis shift‐share, pone de relieve diferencias entre las manufacturas y los servicios, así como entre países. La polarización se observa más bien en los servicios, y en algunos países europeos conduce a rechazar la teoría del sesgo del cambio tecnológico hacia el trabajo calificado.     

Optimal income taxation and migration

We tackle the issue of optimal dynamic taxation of capital income in an economy with disconnection as in Weil (J Public Econ 38:183–198, 1989), generated by migration and intra-family altruism. We show that, when the government aims at correcting such a disconnection using time-varying weights in the social welfare function, then there is room for nonzero capital income taxation, both in the short and in the long run.