Pricing an Outside Barrier Equity-Indexed Annuity with Flexible Monitoring Period

Optimal Surrender Strategies for Equity-Indexed Annuity Investors

An equity-indexed annuity (EIA) is a hybrid between a variable and a fixed annuity that allows the investor to participate in the stock market and earn at least a minimum interest rate. The investor sacrifices some of the upside potential for the downside protection of the minimum guarantee. Because EIAs allow investors to participate in equity growth without the downside risk, their popularity...

Optimal Design of a Perpetual Equity-indexed Annuity

We find the participation rate, guaranteed death benefit, guaranteed surrender benefit, and initial and maintenance fees that most appeal to a buyer of a perpetual equity-indexed annuity (EIA) from the standpoint of maximizing the buyer’s expected discounted utility of wealth at death, also called bequest, while still allowing the issuer of the EIA to (at least) break even on the basis of the e...

Pricing and Hedging Equity Indexed Annuities with Variance-Gamma Deviates

The author analyzes the pricing and hedging problem for Equity Indexed Annuities (EIAs) with underlying risky assets following a geometric Variance-Gamma process. This model allows accurate and parsimonious replication of the implied volatility smiles observed in the financial market. I argue that this model produces consistency in pricing and hedging between the financial and insurance markets...

Pricing Equity-Indexed Annuities Embedded with Exotic Options

On Pricing Barrier Options with Discrete Monitoring

This paper proposes a new approximation method for pricing barrier options with discrete monitoring under stochastic volatility environment. In particular, the integration-by-parts formula and the duality formula in Malliavin calculus are effectively applied in an asymptotic expansion approach. First, the paper derives an asymptotic expansion for generalized Wiener functionals. After it is appl...