Variable annuities represent certain unit-linked life insurance products offering different types of protection commonly referred to as guaranteed minimum benefits (GMXBs). They are designed for the increasing demand of the customers for private pension provision. In this paper we analytically price variable annuities with guaranteed minimum repayments at maturity and in case of the insured’s death. If the contract is prematurely surrendered, the policyholder is entitled to the current value of the fund account reduced by the prevailing surrender fee. The financial market and the mortality model are affine linear. For the surrender model, a Cox process is deployed whose intensity is given by a deterministic function (s-curve) with stochastic inputs from the financial market. So, the policyholders’ surrender behavior depends on the performance of the financial market and is stochastic. The presented pricing scheme incorporates the stochastic surrender behavior of the policyholders and is only based on suitable closed-form approximations.

Recently, several copula-based approaches have been proposed for modeling stationary multivariate time series. All of them are based on vine copulas, and they differ in the choice of the regular vine structure. In this article, we consider a copula autoregressive (COPAR) approach to model the dependence of unobserved multivariate factors resulting from two dynamic factor models. However, the proposed methodology is general and applicable to several factor models as well as to other copula models for stationary multivariate time series. An empirical study illustrates the forecasting superiority of our approach for constructing an optimal portfolio of U.S. industrial stocks in the mean-variance framework.