A smart contract is a set of codes that execute business logics for contractual agreement in financial transactions. Our University of Illinois team has designed various business models for catastrophe risk sharing. In this project, students are expected to learn smart contract programming and build the first of its kind smart contract for distributed insurance. […]
Foot traffic data is captured by various sources, such as smartphone APP, telematics devices in the vehicle, which can help insurance monitor policy holders’ behavior. It is beneficial for insurance companies to price the risk accurately and accelerate the underwriting process. On the other hand, policyholders are given incentives for good driving behavior. There are […]
TStock and index options are traded on the financial market and their prices are determined by supply and demand. These prices are publicly available and are forward-looking: they contain information about the aggregate view of the market about the future dynamics of the financial market. The Volatility Index (VIX) is the market barometer for volatility and […]
Classical backward preferences of an investor are simply defined by a family of her value functions across states and times. Due to the backward nature, a terminal preference must be specified a priori. However, pre-specifying the future preference is actually unjustifiable in practice. To rectify this modeling drawback, a novel concept called forward preferences has […]
As more regulatory reporting requirements in the regulatory regimes around the world move towards dependence on stochastic approaches, insurance companies are experiencing increasing difficulty with detailed forecasting and more accurate valuation and risk assessment based on Monte Carlo simulations. Stochastic modeling is commonly used by financial reporting actuaries whenever reporting procedures, such as reserving and […]
While many retirement planning products such as annuities have been around for centuries, the needs of retirement financial security are drastically different in the 21st century. Just to name a few, the dynamics of family structure, employee-employer relationship, end-of-life care, rising medical costs, and financial technology, all made retirement planning much more complicated than just […]
We would like to understand pollution microclimates. We would like to statistically understand if urban regions with better access to the sky allow for decreased pollution. We will be combining data from: Estimates of pollution from Chicago’s array of things Congestion estimates from the Chicago data portal Estimates of sky occasion from Google Street view Using some […]
Solvency II is concerned about the amount of capital European insurance companies need to hold to reduce the risk of insolvency. An important part of the Solvency II ratio is the risk margin. The first part of the research project will investigate what the risk margin represents, why it has to be calculated and what the relationship […]
In this research project, we focus on dependencies between stock prices. The Herd Behavior Index (HIX) is a measure for the degree of co-movement between stock prices composing a stock market index, such as the Dow Jones or the S&P 500. Monitoring the HIX from day to day may help to detect a market where […]
When a company offers a new insurance product, there are a set of assumptions to be made in order to start the pricing process. For example, the size or frequency of the claims could be unknown, as could be the variability around their expected value. There are several ways in which actuaries estimate these parameters, but the risk […]