Virginia Young

I joined the Department of Mathematics in September 2003, and I teach and research in actuarial and financial mathematics. My research interests include insurance economics, pricing insurance risks using non-additive measures, decision making for individuals in finance and insurance, and pricing and reserving equity-indexed insurance products. Most of my current research deals with financial and insurance decisions of individuals. Such problems are important because of the increasing risk placed on individuals to manage their financial portfolios. Evidence of this can be seen in the greater use of defined contribution plans by employers (401(k), 403(b), 457), as opposed to defined benefit pension plans. Several years ago, I began (with Erhan Bayraktar) studying life insurance decision making to maximize the probability that an individual attains a bequest motive, an area not studied before we began to tackle it.  More recently, I have studied equilibrium strategies under the mean-variance criterion, optimization problems using drawdown (either as a criterion or constraint), optimal (re)insurance under the mean-variance premium principle, optimal investment to minimize the probability of lifetime Parisian ruin, and optimal annuitization under exponential utility.