CAT bonds play an important role in transferring insurance risks to the capital market. It has been observed that typical CAT bond premiums have changed since the recent financial crisis, which has been attributed to market participants being increasingly risk averse. In this work, we first propose a new premium principle, the financial loss premium principle, which includes a term measuring losses in the financial market that we represent here by the Conditional Tail Expectation (CTE) of the negative daily log-return of the S&P 500 index. Our analysis of empirical evidence suggests indeed that in the post-crisis market, instead of simply increasing the fixed level of risk load universally, the increased risk aversion should be modeled jointly by a fixed level of risk load and a financial loss factor to reflect trends in the financial market. This new premium principle is shown to be flexible with respect to the confidence/exceedance level of CTE. In the second part, we focus on the particular example of extreme wildfire risk. The distribution of the amount of precipitation in Fort McMurray, Canada, which is a very important factor in the occurrence of wildfires, is analyzed using extreme value modeling techniques. A wildfire bond with parametric trigger of precipitation is then designed to mitigate extreme wildfire risk, and its premium is predicted using an extreme value analysis of its expected loss. With an application to the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, we demonstrate that the extreme value model is sensible, and we further analyze how our results and construction can be used to provide a design framework for CAT bonds which may appeal to (re)insurers and investors alike.

This paper proposes a new continuous-time framework to analyze optimal reinsurance, in which an insurer and a reinsurer are two players of a stochastic Stackelberg differential game, i.e., a stochastic leader-follower differential game. This allows us to determine optimal reinsurance from joint interests of the insurer and the reinsurer, which is rarely considered in the continuous-time setting. In the Stackelberg game, the reinsurer moves first and the insurer does subsequently to achieve a Stackelberg equilibrium toward optimal reinsurance arrangement. Speaking more precisely, the reinsurer is the leader of the game and decides on an optimal reinsurance premium to charge, while the insurer is the follower of the game and chooses an optimal proportional reinsurance to purchase. Under utility maximization criteria, we study the game problem starting from the general setting with generic utilities and random coefficients to the special case with exponential utilities and constant coefficients. In the special case, we find that the reinsurer applies the variance premium principle to calculate the optimal reinsurance premium and the insurer's optimal ceding/retained proportion of insurance risk depends not only on the risk aversion of itself but also on that of the reinsurer.

We study a stochastic differential game problem between two insurers, who invest in a financial market and adopt reinsurance to manage their claim risks. Supposing that their reinsurance premium rates are calculated according to the generalized mean-variance principle, we consider the competition between the two insurers as a non-zero sum stochastic differential game. Using dynamic programming technique, we derive a system of coupled Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equations and show the existence of equilibrium strategies. For an exponential utility maximizing game and a probability maximizing game, we obtain semi-explicit solutions for the equilibrium strategies and the equilibrium value functions, respectively. Finally, we provide some detailed comparative-static analyses on the equilibrium strategies and illustrate some economic insights.

In Ludkovski, Risk, and Zail (2018), the email address for Jimmy Risk appeared incorrectly.

Jimmy Risk's email address should appear as jrisk@cpp.edu.

The original article has been corrected to rectify this error.

The analysis of capital injection strategy in the literature of insurance risk models (e.g. Pafumi, 1998; Dickson and Waters, 2004) typically assumes that whenever the surplus becomes negative, the amount of shortfall is injected so that the company can continue its business forever. Recently, Nie et al. (2011) has proposed an alternative model in which capital is immediately injected to restore the surplus level to a positive level b when the surplus falls between zero and b, and the insurer is still subject to a positive ruin probability. Inspired by the idea of randomized observations in Albrecher et al. (2011b), in this paper, we further generalize Nie et al. (2011)'s model by assuming that capital injections are only allowed at a sequence of time points with inter-capital-injection times being Erlang distributed (so that deterministic time intervals can be approximated using the Erlangization technique in Asmussen et al. (2002)). When the claim amount is distributed as a combination of exponentials, explicit formulas for the Gerber–Shiu expected discounted penalty function (Gerber and Shiu, 1998) and the expected total discounted cost of capital injections before ruin are obtained. The derivations rely on a resolvent density associated with an Erlang random variable, which is shown to admit an explicit expression that is of independent interest as well. We shall provide numerical examples, including an application in pricing a perpetual reinsurance contract that makes the capital injections and demonstration of how to minimize the ruin probability via reinsurance. Minimization of the expected discounted capital injections plus a penalty applied at ruin with respect to the frequency of injections and the critical level b will also be illustrated numerically.

In Venter and Şahin (2017), the author's name appeared incorrectly as “ŞULE ŞAHÎN”.

The author's name should appear as “ŞULE ŞAHİN”.

The original article has been corrected to rectify this error.