The Riccati Tontine: How to Satisfy Regulators on Average

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Riccati tontine, a novel longevity risk pooling method that uses negatively correlated assets to ensure stable payouts, satisfying regulators and providing robustness during crises.

Contribution

It proposes a new accumulation-based tontine design with non-market correlated assets and provides a mathematical proof involving a Riccati differential equation.

Findings

Expected payouts are resilient during pandemics.

Assets are chosen to negatively correlate with mortality shocks.

Mathematical proof of the Riccati differential equation governing the schedule.

Abstract

This paper presents a new type of modern accumulation-based tontine, called the Riccati tontine, named after two Italians: mathematician Jacobo Riccati (b. 1676, d. 1754) and financier Lorenzo di Tonti (b. 1602, d. 1684). The Riccati tontine is yet another way of pooling and sharing longevity risk, but is different from competing designs in two key ways. The first is that in the Riccati tontine, the representative investor is expected -- although not guaranteed -- to receive their money back if they die, or when the tontine lapses. The second is that the underlying funds within the tontine are deliberately {\em not} indexed to the stock market. Instead, the risky assets or underlying investments are selected so that return shocks are negatively correlated with stochastic mortality, which will maximize the expected payout to survivors. This means that during a pandemic, for example, the Riccati tontine fund's performance will be impaired relative to the market index, but will not be expected to lose money for participants. In addition to describing and explaining the rationale for this non-traditional asset allocation, the paper provides a mathematical proof that the recovery schedule that generates this financial outcome satisfies a first-order ODE that is quadratic in the unknown function, which (yes) is known as a Riccati equation.