Dear Colleagues,

The problem of increasing life expectancy and ageing population has attracted attentions from both academics and practitioners in developed, as well as emerging, countries for years. While recent literature has provided extensive discussions that advocate more accurate mortality prediction models, more efficient pension fund management strategies, and more effective product designs and innovations, it typically ignores or at least fails to highlight the importance of the traditional products such as life insurance policies and annuities in reconciling the problem of outliving retirement incomes. A proper use of these traditional products based on good estimations of their optimal demands could greatly reduce the longevity and aging population risks. This Special Issue is aimed to promote studies of optimal demands for life insurance and annuities of an individual, a household, an institution, a subpopulation, or a country as a whole. Through this Special Issue, we would like to highlight empirical results and methods, as well as numerical algorithms related to determining the optimal life insurance and annuities demands. Analyses may consider longevity risk, natural hedging strategies, unfavorable investment environment due to low interest rates and volatile financial markets, new insurance regulations, as well as cultural barriers.

We welcome research papers or reviews, related but not limited to, the following topics:

• Microeconomic or macroeconomic modeling
• Econometric analysis
• Single-period or multi-period optimization
• Dynamic programming
• Stochastic risk modeling
• Risk sharing and risk hedging mechanisms
• Impact of regulations and cultural barriers on life insurance and annuities demands
• Financial investment strategies

All manuscripts will be refereed through the standard peer-review process of the journal.

Dr. Ruilin Tian
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Risks is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• life insurance
• annuities
• longevity risk and mortality risk
• natural hedging
• optimization
• dynamic programming
• bellman equation or Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation
• actuarial and financial risks
• risk sharing mechanisms
• microeconomic or macroeconomic modeling