The aporetic financialisation of insurance liabilities: Reserving under Solvency II

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.

On the Market-Consistent Valuation of Participating Life Insurance Heterogeneous Contracts under Longevity Risk

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a market-consistent valuation of life insurance participating liabilities sold to a population of partially heterogeneous customers under the joint impact of biometric and financial risk. In particular, the heterogeneity between groups of policyholders stems from their offered minimum interest rate guarantees and contract maturities. We analyse the effects of these features on the company’s insolvency while embracing the insurer’s goal to achieve the same expected return for different cohorts of policyholders. Within our extensive numerical analyses, we determine the fair participation rates and other key figures, and discuss the implications for the stakeholders, taking account of various degrees of conservativeness of the insurer when pricing the contracts.

Robust long-term interest rate risk hedging in incomplete bond markets

Pricing ultra-long-dated pension liabilities under the market-consistent valuation is challenged by the scarcity of the long-term market instruments that match or exceed the terms of pension liabilities. We develop a robust self-financing hedging strategy which adopts a min–max expected shortfall hedging criterion to replicate the long-dated liabilities for agents who fear parameter misspecification. We introduce a backward robust least squares Monte Carlo method to solve this dynamic robust optimization problem. We find that both naive and robust optimal portfolios depend on the hedging horizon and the current funding ratio. The robust policy suggests taking more risk when the current funding ratio is low. The yield curve constructed by the robust dynamic hedging portfolio is always lower than the naive one but is higher than the model-based yield curve in a low-rate environment.

Sovereign Risk in Macroprudential Solvency Stress Testing

This paper explains the treatment of sovereign risk in macroprudential solvency stress testing, based on the experiences in the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). We discuss four essential steps in assessing the system-wide impact of sovereign risk: scope, loss estimation, shock calibration, and capital impact calculation. Most importantly, a market-consistent valuation approach lies at the heart of assessing the resilience of the financial sector in a tail risk scenario with sovereign distress. We present a flexible, closed-form approach to calibrating haircuts based on changes in expected sovereign defaults affecting bank solvency during adverse macroeconomic conditions. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of using extreme value theory (EVT) in this context, with empirical examples from past FSAPs.