Mortality linked derivatives and their pricing

This thesis addresses the absence of explicit pricing formulae and the complexity of proposed models (incomplete markets framework) in the area of mortality risk management requiring the application of advanced techniques from the realm of Financial Mathematics and Actuarial Science. In fact, this is a multi-essay dissertation contributing in the direction of designing and pricing mortality-linked derivatives and offering the state of art solutions to manage longevity risk. The first essay investigates the valuation of Catastrophic Mortality Bonds and, in particular, the case of the Swiss Re Mortality Bond 2003 as a primary example of this class of assets. This bond was the first Catastrophic Mortality Bond to be launched in the market and encapsulates the behaviour of a well-defined mortality index to generate payoffs for bondholders. Pricing this type of bond is a challenging task and no closed form solution exists in the literature. In my approach, we adapt the payoff of such a bond in terms of the payoff of an Asian put option and present a new methodology to derive model-independent bounds for catastrophic mortality bonds by exploiting the theory of comonotonicity. While managing catastrophic mortality risk is an upheaval task for insurers and re-insurers, the insurance industry is facing an even bigger challenge - the challenge of coping up with increased life expectancy. The recent years have witnessed unprecedented changes in mortality rate. As a result academicians and practitioners have started treating mortality in a stochastic manner. Moreover, the assumption of independence between mortality and interest rate has now been replaced by the observation that there is indeed a correlation between the two rates. Therefore, my second essay studies valuation of Guaranteed Annuity Options (GAOs) under the most generalized modeling framework where both interest rate and mortality risk are stochastic and correlated. Pricing these types of options in the correlated environment is an arduous task and a closed form solution is non-existent. In my approach, I employ the use of doubly stochastic stopping times to incorporate the randomness about the time of death and employ a suitable change of measure to facilitate the valuation of survival benefit, there by adapting the payoff of the GAO in terms of the payoff of a basket call option. I then derive general price bounds for GAOs by employing the theory of comonotonicity and the Rogers-Shi (Rogers and Shi, 1995) approach. Moreover, I suggest some `model-robust' tight bounds based on the moment generating function (m.g.f.) and characteristic function (c.f.) under the affine set up. The strength of these bounds is their computational speed which makes them indispensable for annuity providers who rely heavily on Monte Carlo simulations to calculate the fair market value of Guaranteed Annuity Options. In fact, sans Monte Carlo, the academic literature does not offer any solution for the pricing of the GAOs. I illustrate the performance of the bounds for a variety of affine processes governing the evolution of mortality and the interest rate by comparing them with the benchmark Monte Carlo estimates. Through my work, I have been able to express the payoffs of two well known modern mortality products in terms of payoffs of financial derivatives, there by filling the gaps in the literature and offering state of art techniques for pricing of these sophisticated instruments.