Life insurance products are usually equipped with minimum guarantee and bonus provision options. The pricing of such claims is of vital importance for the insurance industry. Risk management, strategic asset allocation, and product design depend on the correct evaluation of the written options....

New international accounting standards requires insurers to reflect the value of embedded options and guarantees in their products. Pricing techniques based on the Black amp; Scholes paradigm are often used, however, the hypotheses underneath this model are rarely met.We propose a framework that...

Are Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Research & Development (R&D) productive inputs or efficiency determinants? This is the topic of this paper which analyses a sample of 2691 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2007-2009. The empirical setting is based on a production...

The empirical literature on trade imbalances does not make currency tensions easy to understand, because tensions across traders originate from the assumption that export-price elasticity is high. This paper provides new evidence by analysing the export-behaviour of China, France, Germany,...