The 1999 Small Employer Retirement Survey

Abstract

In this article we examine to what extent policyholders buying a certain class of participating contracts (in which they are entitled to receive dividends from the insurer) can be described as standard bondholders. Our analysis extends the ideas of Biihlmann and sequences the fundamental advances of Merton, Longstaff and Schwartz, and Briys and de Varenne. In particular, we develop a setup where these participating policies are comparable to hybrid bonds but not to standard risky bonds (as done in most papers dealing with the pricing of participating contracts). In this mixed framework, policyholders are only partly protected against default consequences. Continuous and discrete protections are also studied in an early default Black and Cox-type setting. A comparative analysis of the impact of various protection schemes on ruin probabilities and severities of a life insurance company that sells only this class of contracts concludes this work.