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This article takes a contingent claim approach to the market valuation of equity and liabilities in life insurance companies. A model is presented that explicitly takes into account the following: (i) the holders of life insurance contracts (LICs) have the first claim on the company's assets, whereas equity holders have limited liability; (ii) interest rate guarantees are common elements of LICs; and (iii) LICs according to the so-called contribution principle are entitled to receive a fair share of any investment surplus. Furthermore, a regulatory mechanism in the form of an intervention rule is built into the model. This mechanism is shown to significantly reduce the insolvency risk of the issued contracts, and it implies that the various claims on the company's assets become more exotic and obtain barrier option properties. Closed valuation formulas are nevertheless derived. Finally, some representative numerical examples illustrate how the model can be used to establish the set of initially fair contracts and to determine the market values of contracts after their inception.The authors are grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees;

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This article derives the first analytical pricing formulas for American-style Asian options of the so-called floating strike type. Geometric as well as arithmetic averaging is considered. The setup is a standard Black-Scholes framework where the price of the underlying security evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion. A decomposition result that splits up the value of the floating strike American option into the price of an otherwise equivalent European option and an early exercise premium is first presented. This decomposition result is then manipulated further for the two separate types of averaging. With geometric averaging we derive an exact pricing formula, whereas with arithmetic averaging we develop an analytical approximation formula that proves to be very precise. Numerical examples are provided.asian options, american options, analytical valuation formulas, numerical work, change of numeraire

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