Hedging Equity-Linked Life Insurance Contracts

Thomas Møller

North American Actuarial Journal, 2001, vol. 5, issue 2, 79-95

Abstract: This paper examines a portfolio of equity-linked life insurance contracts and determines risk-minimizing hedging strategies within a discrete-time setup. As a principal example, I consider the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model and an equity-linked pure endowment contract under which the policyholder receives max(ST, K) at time T if he or she is then alive, where ST is the value of a stock index at the term T of the contract and K is a guarantee stipulated by the contract. In contrast to most of the existing literature, I view the contracts as contingent claims in an incomplete model and discuss the problem of choosing an optimality criterion for hedging strategies. The subsequent analysis leads to a comparison of the risk (measured by the variance of the insurer’s loss) inherent in equity-linked contracts in the two situations where the insurer applies the risk-minimizing strategy and the insurer does not hedge. The paper includes numerical results that can be used to quantify the effect of hedging and describe how this effect varies with the size of the insurance portfolio and assumptions concerning the mortality.

Date: 2001
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DOI: 10.1080/10920277.2001.10595986

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