The Securitization of Longevity Risk and Its Implications for Retirement Security


Book Description

The economic significance of longevity risk for governments, corporations, and individuals has begun to be recognized and quantified. The traditional insurance route for managing this risk has serious limitations due to capacity constraints that are becoming more and more binding. If the 2010 U.S. population lived three years longer than expected then the government would have to set aside 50% of the U.S. 2010 GDP or approximately $7.37 trillion to fully fund that increased social security liability. This is just one way of gauging the size of the risk. Due to the much larger capacity of capital markets more attention is being devoted to transforming longevity risk from its pure risk form to a speculative risk form so that it can be traded in the capital markets. This transformation has implications for governments, corporations and individuals that will be explored here. The analysis will view the management of longevity risk by considering how defined contribution plans can be managed to increase the sustainable length of retirement and by considering how defined benefit plans can be managed to reduce pension risk using longevity risk hedging schemes.




Securitization, Structuring and Pricing of Longevity Risk


Book Description

Pricing and risk management for longevity risk has increasingly become a major challenge for life insurers and pension funds around the world. Risk transfer to financial markets, with their major capacity for efficient risk pooling, is an area of significant development for a successful longevity product market. The structuring and pricing of longevity risk using modern securitization methods, common in financial markets, has yet to be successfully implemented for longevity risk management. There are many issues that remain unresolved in order to ensure the successful development of a longevity risk market. This paper considers the securitization of longevity risk focusing on the structuring and pricing of a longevity bond using techniques developed in the financial markets, particularly for mortgages and credit risk. A model based on Australian mortality data and calibrated to insurance risk linked market data is used to assess the structure and market consistent pricing of a longevity bond. Age dependence in the securitized risks is shown to be a critical factor in structuring and pricing longevity linked securitizations.




Longevity Risk from a Pension Fund Perspective


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.7, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Faculty of Economics and Business Administration), language: English, abstract: Assurance companies face two main risk factors in the process of pricing annuity products namely the interest risk and the longevity risk. There are numerous products and possibilities for the insurers to hedge their interest risk using interest derivatives and long bonds. Hedging products against the longevity risk is uncommon but insurers have to take it into account when they are pricing their annuity products. There are two types of longevity risks. On the one hand the idiosyncratic longevity risk and on the other hand the systematic longevity risk. With regards to the idiosyncratic longevity risk, individuals are faced with the issue that they need to invest in assets for their retirement in spite of an uncertain span of lifetime and thus an uncertain investment horizon. Pricing of life annuities could be done according to corresponding mortality tables. If the clients of an insurer die on average according to mortality rates provided by such tables, the revenues of the insurer should be sufficient to ensure the payments for the clients who are still alive. The issue out of a pension fund perspective is that longevity has been improving over time and clients could live longer than anticipated. These improvements occurred in an unpredictable way, especially at higher ages according to Cairns et al. (2006). Insurers therefore made false calculations of the insurance premium and suffered losses due to pensioners living longer than anticipated. The systematic longevity risk is based on the stochastic variation of mortality. The future development of life expectancy will be highly unpredictable due to medical improvements or discoveries in genetic research. For that reason insurers need stochastic models to quantify the systematic mortality changes ov




Recreating Sustainable Retirement


Book Description

The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession alerted those seeking to protect old-age security, about the extreme risks confronting the financial and political institutions comprising our retirement system. The workforce of today and tomorrow must count on longer lives and deferred retirement, while at the same time it is taking on increased responsibility for managing retirement risk. This volume explores new ways to think about, manage, and finance longevity risk, capital market risk, model risk, and regulatory risk. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the 'black swans' that threaten private and public pensions around the world such as capital market shocks, surprises to longevity, regulatory/political risk, and errors in modelling, will all have profound consequences for stakeholders ranging from pension plan participants, plan sponsors, policymakers, and those who seek to make retirement more resistant. This book analyzes such challenges to retirement sustainability, and it explores ways to better manage and finance them. Insights provided help build retirement systems capable of withstanding what the future will bring.




Pension Fund Risk Management


Book Description

As pension fund systems decrease and dependency ratios increase, risk management is becoming more complex in public and private pension plans. Pension Fund Risk Management: Financial and Actuarial Modeling sheds new light on the current state of pension fund risk management and provides new technical tools for addressing pension risk from an integr




Pension Economics


Book Description

While not attempting to train readers as professional economists, this book aims to provide a secure grounding in the theory and practice of economics insofar as it deals with pension matters. From reading this book, the user will understand: * The key types of pension scheme * The role of pensions in maximizing individual lifetime welfare * The role of pensions in individual savings and retirement decisions * The role and consequences of the pension plan from the company's viewpoint * The role of pensions in promoting aggregate savings * The role of pensions and retirement in overlapping generations models * The economics of ageing and intergenerational accounting * The social welfare implications of pensions * The lessons of behavioural economics for pensions




Global Financial Stability Report, April 2012


Book Description

The April 2012 Global Financial Stability Report assesses changes in risks to financial stability over the past six months, focusing on sovereign vulnerabilities, risks stemming from private sector deleveraging, and assessing the continued resilience of emerging markets. The report probes the implications of recent reforms in the financial system for market perception of safe assets, and investigates the growing public and private costs of increased longevity risk from aging populations.




Pension Revolution


Book Description

Praise for Pension Revolution "When Keith Ambachtsheer puts his keen mind to work on a problem, watch out! Here he exposes today's fragile arrangements for the most serious social dilemma of our times--financing retirement. Then he provides a compelling and powerful set of solutions. His writings are essential reading for all who care about the future of American living standards." --Peter Bernstein, founder and President, Peter L. Bernstein, Inc., and author of Capital Ideas and Against the Gods "This book describes one of the most ingenious inventions in the history of mankind: pension funds offering credible promises about old-age income. It reads like a thriller: how can well-governed pension funds be created in an imperfect world in which mortals wrestle with foibles and moral shortcomings? One of the world's leading experts on pensions searches for the answer--and finds it." --Lans Bovenberg, Scientific Director, Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging, and Retirement, Tilburg University, The Netherlands "Pension Revolution exposes the inadequacies of current pension systems and persuasively makes the case for the fundamental changes that are needed. It is essential reading for both the pension industry and policymakers." --Elizabeth Bryan, Chair, Investment Committee, Unisuper Management PM Ltd, Australia "Most analyses of complicated issues deal with complexity by simplifying or only looking at one piece-part, and, in doing so, provide limited value. In stark contrast, Keith Ambachtsheer boldly wades into the complexity in Pension Revolution to come up with a valuable integrative solution. He is a most welcome revolutionary!" --Roger Martin, Dean, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada "We have known Keith for over ten years, and consistently over that time, he has constructively and comprehensively challenged conventional wisdom. He has done this so effectively that many of his initial thoughts have now become universally accepted norms. Such is his energy however that he continues to push the boundaries of pension and investment thinking." --Peter Moon, Chief Investment Officer, Universities Superannuation Scheme Ltd, UK "Pension Revolution not only explains the shortcomings of the existing pension system and the underlying design features that have resulted in the current pension upheaval. It also offers thoughtful and creative suggestions for prospective pension design. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of retirement finance." --James Poterba, Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the TIAA-CREF Board of Trustees




OECD Pensions Outlook 2012


Book Description

This edition looks at pension reform during the crisis and beyond, the design of automatic adjustment mechanisms, reversals of systemic pension reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, coverage of private pension systems and guarantees indefined contribution pension systems.




Modelling Longevity Dynamics for Pensions and Annuity Business


Book Description

Mortality improvements, uncertainty in future mortality trends and the relevant impact on life annuities and pension plans constitute important topics in the field of actuarial mathematics and life insurance techniques. In particular, actuarial calculations concerning pensions, life annuities and other living benefits (provided, for example, by long-term care insurance products and whole life sickness covers) are based on survival probabilities which necessarily extend over a long time horizon. In order to avoid underestimation of the related liabilities, the insurance company (or the pension plan) must adopt an appropriate forecast of future mortality. Great attention is currently being devoted to the management of life annuity portfolios, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view, because of the growing importance of annuity benefits paid by private pension schemes. In particular, the progressive shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension schemes has increased the interest in life annuities with a guaranteed annual amount. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed description of methods for projecting mortality, and an extensive introduction to some important issues concerning longevity risk in the area of life annuities and pension benefits. It relies on research work carried out by the authors, as well as on a wide teaching experience and in CPD (Continuing Professional Development) initiatives. The following topics are dealt with: life annuities in the framework of post-retirement income strategies; the basic mortality model; recent mortality trends that have been experienced; general features of projection models; discussion of stochastic projection models, with numerical illustrations; measuring and managing longevity risk.