**About the Editor**

**Mogens Steffensen** is professor of Life Insurance Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the same university in 2001. After visiting positions in Germany, England, and the USA, he became a professor in 2008. He has contributed to the development of market-based valuation methods in insurance. His research also covers various decision-making problems within insurance and finance, and, recently, he is mainly interested in integrating insurance and pension decisions into classical consumption–investment problems. He has written 45 articles and 2 monographs in the areas of actuarial science and mathematical finance. He participates actively in industrial discussions about accounting, solvency, and risk management, and he has taken part in several research projects together with partners in the Danish pension industry. He is member of the Solvency and Accounting Committee under the Danish Actuarial Association. He is member of the board of directors and the audit committee of PFA Pension, the largest Danish commercial pension fund and the 10th largest pension fund in Europe.

#### **Preface to "Risks: Feature Papers 2020"**

The advancements and applications of risk modeling, and the impact on individual, institutional, and national decision-making is the broad scope of *Risks*. Actuarial mathematics and mathematical finance is at the core of this area, where institutional is in reference to insurance and financial institutions. But around this core we find, more generally, actuarial science and financial economics. Actuarial science can be thought of as combining economic and other social scientific elements with actuarial mathematics, expanding the insurance domain beyond its formalizations. Further away from the core, but still within the scope of acturial mathematics and mathematical finance, we find other branches that either draw on the advances in risk modeling, or relate to the insurance and financial decision-making with new insights and ideas but not necessarily advancements in risk modeling itself.

This book contains eight articles that explore advancements that are being developed across the diverse range that this area touches upon, all encompassed within the description of the scope above. Advancements of probabilistic models beyond the standard, and their impact on pricing and hedging, is at the core of mathematical finance. Such studies are, currently, rarely found in finance journals but frequently, and most appropriately, found in *Risks*. Much of financial research over the past decade has evolved into taking more standard models and drawing new insights from the financial data, and such research is certainly also welcome in *Risks*. Real estate and agricultural economics is also about effectively pricing assets, the financial contracts written on those prices, and the understanding of the dynamics of observed prices. The methods of machine learning, their predictive power, and the statistical assumptions and methods behind them, are tools that will inevitably find their place in the market. Modeling pandemic risk is, for obvious reasons, topical in health science, but its applications in health and life insurance are similarly of keen interest at the moment. Finally, understanding the behavior of health insurance policy holders is a core aspect of actuarial science. We hope you enjoy this collection of feature articles and find it insightful!

> **Mogens Steffensen** *Editor*
