A risk-based premium: What does it mean for DB plan sponsors?

This paper develops a risked-based premium calculation model for the insurance provided by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). It takes account of the pension fund’s and the plan sponsor’s investment policy and extends Chen (2011) by considering distress termination triggered by the sponsor’s underfunding. We empirically illustrate our theoretical pricing formula for the 100 biggest American DB sponsoring companies. Our result clearly casts doubt on the current practice where about 70% of the PBGC premiums charged are flat. We observe that the funding ratio and the leverage are the main risk factors in a risk-based premium calculation.     

Valuation of risk-based premium of DB pension plan with terminations

This paper concentrates on the premium valuation of pension insurance provided by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). The PBGC provides a defined benefit pension sponsor with coverage in case that the pension fund fails to make pension payments as promised or that the plan sponsor does not stay in business any more. In practice, both the pension fund and the sponsor assets play a critical role in fulfilling the commitment of pension payments, and thereby it is not reasonable to isolate the risk of distress termination of the sponsor assets from that of the premature termination of the pension fund. Different from previous works in which the premature termination of the pension fund and the distress termination of the sponsor assets are analyzed separately, our model examines the situation in which retirees suffer the risk of two types of terminations at the same time. We evaluate the risk-based fair premium under the framework that the pension fund and the sponsor assets are correlated and subject to the risk of the involuntary termination (i.e., premature termination) and the distress termination, respectively. In this framework, we manage to obtain closed-form pricing formulas. Our model is more practical because of the realistic design of termination schemes. Numerical simulations are also carried out to demonstrate our findings. Our numerical experiments validate that a variable rate premium is more appropriate for the PBGC to implement.