We present an approach to market-consistent multi-period valuation of insurance liability cash flows based on a two-stage valuation procedure. First, a portfolio of traded financial instrument aimed at replicating the liability cash flow is fixed. Then the residual cash flow is managed by repeated one-period replication using only cash funds. The latter part takes capital requirements and costs into account, as well as limited liability and risk averseness of capital providers. The cost-of-capital margin is the value of the residual cash flow. We set up a general framework for the cost-of-capital margin and relate it to dynamic risk measurement. Moreover, we present explicit formulas and properties of the cost-of-capital margin under further assumptions on the model for the liability cash flow and on the conditional risk measures and utility functions. Finally, we highlight computational aspects of the cost-of-capital margin, and related quantities, in terms of an example from life insurance.

The aim of this paper is to define the market-consistent multi-period value of an insurance liability cash flow in discrete time subject to repeated capital requirements, and explore its properties. In line with current regulatory frameworks, the presented approach is based on a hypothetical transfer of the original liability and a replicating portfolio to an empty corporate entity, whose owner must comply with repeated one-period capital requirements but has the option to terminate the ownership at any time. The value of the liability is defined as the no-arbitrage price of the cash flow to the policyholders, optimally stopped from the owner’s perspective, taking capital requirements into account. The value is computed as the solution to a sequence of coupled optimal stopping problems or, equivalently, as the solution to a backward recursion.

We consider multi-period cost-of-capital valuation of a liability cash flow subject to repeated capital requirements that are partly financed by capital injections from capital providers with limited liability. Limited liability means that, in any given period, the capital provider is not liable for further payment in the event that the capital provided at the beginning of the period turns out to be insufficient to cover both the current-period payments and the updated value of the remaining cash flow. The liability cash flow is modeled as a continuous-time stochastic process on [0,T]. The multi-period structure is given by a partition of [0,T] into subintervals, and on the corresponding finite set of times, a discrete-time cost-of-capital-margin process is defined. Our main objective is the analysis of existence and properties of continuous-time limits of discrete-time cost-of-capital-margin processes corresponding to a sequence of partitions whose meshes tend to zero. Moreover, we provide explicit expressions for the limit processes when cash flows are given by Itô diffusions and processes with independent increments.

In this paper we explore ways of numerically computing recursive dynamic monetary risk measures and utility functions. Computationally, this problem suffers from the curse of dimensionality and nested simulations are unfeasible if there are more than two time steps. The approach considered in this paper is to use a Least Squares Monte Carlo (LSM) algorithm to tackle this problem, a method which has been primarily considered for valuing American derivatives, or more general stopping time problems, as these also give rise to backward recursions with corresponding challenges in terms of numerical computation. We give some overarching consistency results for the LSM algorithm in a general setting as well as explore numerically its performance for recursive Cost-of-Capital valuation, a special case of a dynamic monetary utility function.