Markovian Approaches to Joint-life Mortality with Applications in Risk Management

• Main Author: Ji, Min
• Language: en
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Markov; Semi-Markov; Joint lives; Mortality; Longevity; Actuarial Science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10012/6090

The combined survival status of the insured lives is a critical problem when pricing and reserving insurance products with more than one life. Our preliminary experience examination of bivariate annuity data from a large Canadian insurance company shows that the relative risk of mortality for an individual increases after the loss of his/her spouse, and that the increase is especially dramatic shortly after bereavement. This preliminary result is supported by the empirical studies over the past 50 years, which suggest dependence between a husband and wife. The dependence between a married couple may be significant in risk management of joint-life policies. This dissertation progressively explores Markovian models in pricing and risk management of joint-life policies, illuminating their advantages in dependent modeling of joint time-until-death (or other exit time) random variables. This dissertation argues that in the dependent modeling of joint-life dependence, Markovian models are flexible, transparent, and easily extended. Multiple state models have been widely used in historic data analysis, particularly in the modeling of failures that have event-related dependence. This dissertation introduces a ¡°common shock¡± factor into a standard Markov joint-life mortality model, and then extends it to a semi-Markov model to capture the decaying effect of the "broken heart" factor. The proposed models transparently and intuitively measure the extent of three types of dependence: the instantaneous dependence, the short-term impact of bereavement, and the long-term association between lifetimes. Some copula-based dependence measures, such as upper tail dependence, can also be derived from Markovian approaches. Very often, death is not the only mode of decrement. Entry into long-term care and voluntary prepayment, for instance, can affect reverse mortgage terminations. The semi-Markov joint-life model is extended to incorporate more exit modes, to model joint-life reverse mortgage termination speed. The event-triggered dependence between a husband and wife is modeled. For example, one spouse's death increases the survivor's inclination to move close to kin. We apply the proposed model specifically to develop the valuation formulas for roll-up mortgages in the UK and Home Equity Conversion Mortgages in the US. We test the significance of each termination mode and then use the model to investigate the mortgage insurance premiums levied on Home Equity Conversion Mortgage borrowers. Finally, this thesis extends the semi-Markov joint-life mortality model to having stochastic transition intensities, for modeling joint-life longevity risk in last-survivor annuities. We propose a natural extension of Gompertz' law to have correlated stochastic dynamics for its two parameters, and incorporate it into the semi-Markov joint-life mortality model. Based on this preliminary joint-life longevity model, we examine the impact of mortality improvement on the cost of a last survivor annuity, and investigate the market prices of longevity risk in last survivor annuities using risk-neutral pricing theory.