Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2018
In this paper, we extend the optimality of the barrier strategy for the dividend payment problem to the setting that the underlying surplus process is a spectrally negative Lévy process and the discounting factor is an exponential Lévy process. The proof of the main result uses the fluctuation identities of spectrally negative Lévy processes. This extends recent results of Eisenberg for the case where the accumulated interest rate and surplus process are independent Brownian motions with drift.