Valuing equity-linked death benefits with a threshold expense strategy

We investigate equity-linked investment products with a threshold expense strategy, under which an insurance company will collect expenses continuously from the policyholder's account only when the account value is lower than a pre-specified level. The logarithmic value of the policyholder's account, before deducting any fees, is described by a jump diffusion process which is independent of the time-to-death random variable. The distribution of the time-to-death random variable is approximated by a combination of exponential distributions, which are dense in the space of density functions on [0, infinity). We characterize the Laplace transform of the distribution of a general refracted jump diffusion process through some integro-differential equations. Besides, the distribution of a refracted double exponential jump diffusion process at an independent exponential random variable is derived, from which closed-form formulas to evaluate the total expenses and the fair fee rates are obtained. Finally, we illustrate our results by some numerical examples. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.