On the ruin time distribution for a Sparre Andersen process with exponential claim sizes

We derive a closed-form (infinite series) representation for the distribution of the ruin time for the Sparre Andersen model with exponentially distributed claims. This extends a recent result of Dickson et al. [Dickson, D.C.M., Hughes, B.D., Zhang, L., 2005. The density of the time to ruin for a Sparre Andersen process with Erlang arrivals and exponential claims. Scand. Actuar. J., 358-376] for such processes with Erlang inter-claim times. The derivation is based on transforming the original boundary crossing problem to an equivalent one on linear lower boundary crossing by a spectrally positive Levy process. We illustrate our result in the cases of gamma, mixed exponential and inverse Gaussian inter-claim time distributions. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.