The asset allocation is a crucial decision for pension funds, and this paper analyses the economic factors which determine this choice. The analysis proceeds on the basis that, in the absence of taxation, risk sharing and default insurance, the asset allocation between equities and bonds is indeterminate and governed by the risk/return preferences of the trustees and the employer. If the employing company and its shareholders are subject to taxation, there is a tax advantage in a largely bond allocation. Risk sharing between the employer and the employees often means that one group favours a high equity allocation, while the other favours a low equity allocation. Underpriced default insurance creates an incentive for a high equity allocation. When taxation, risk sharing and underpriced default insurance are all present, it is concluded that the appropriate asset allocation varies with the circumstances of the scheme; but that a high equity allocation is probably inappropriate for many private sector pension schemes.

In recent years, market-consistent valuation approaches have gained an increasing importance for insurance companies. This has triggered an increasing interest among practitioners and academics, and a number of specific studies on such valuation approaches have been published.

In this paper, we present a generic model for the valuation of life insurance contracts and embedded options. Furthermore, we describe various numerical valuation approaches within our generic setup. We particularly focus on contracts containing early exercise features since these present (numerically) challenging valuation problems.

Based on an example of participating life insurance contracts, we illustrate the different approaches and compare their efficiency in a simple and a generalized Black-Scholes setup, respectively. Moreover, we study the impact of the considered early exercise feature on our example contract and analyze the influence of model risk by additionally introducing an exponential Lévy model.