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In this paper we consider the optimal dividend problem for an insurance company whose risk process evolves as a spectrally negative Lévy process in the absence of dividend payments. The classical dividend problem for an insurance company consists in finding a dividend payment policy that maximizes the total expected discounted dividends. Related is the problem where we impose the restriction that ruin be prevented: the beneficiaries of the dividends must then keep the insurance company solvent by bail-out loans. Drawing on the fluctuation theory of spectrally negative Lévy processes we give an explicit analytical description of the optimal strategy in the set of barrier strategies and the corresponding value function, for either of the problems. Subsequently we investigate when the dividend policy that is optimal among all admissible ones takes the form of a barrier strategy.1. Introduction. In classical collective risk theory (e.g., [11]) the surplus X = {X t , t ≥ 0} of an insurance company with initial capital x is described by the Cramér-Lundberg model:

In this paper we study the joint ruin problem for two insurance companies that divide between them both claims and premia in some specified proportions (modeling two branches of the same insurance company or an insurance and re-insurance company). Modeling the risk processes of the insurance companies by Cramér-Lundberg processes we obtain the Laplace transform in space of the probability that either of the insurance companies is ruined in finite time. Subsequently, for exponentially distributed claims, we derive an explicit analytical expression for this joint ruin probability by explicitly inverting this Laplace transform. We also provide a characterization of the Laplace transform of the joint ruin time.

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Consider two insurance companies (or two branches of the same company) that divide between them both claims and premia in some specified proportions. We model the occurrence of claims according to a renewal process. One ruin problem considered is that of the corresponding two-dimensional risk process first leaving the positive quadrant; another is that of entering the negative quadrant. When the claims arrive according to a Poisson process, we obtain a closed form expression for the ultimate ruin probability. In the general case, we analyze the asymptotics of the ruin probability when the initial reserves of both companies tend to infinity under a Cramér light-tail assumption on the claim size distribution.

We investigate the problem of optimal dividend distribution for a company in the presence of regime shifts. We consider a company whose cumulative net revenues evolve as a Brownian motion with positive drift that is modulated by a finite state Markov chain, and model the discount rate as a deterministic function of the current state of the chain. In this setting, the objective of the company is to maximize the expected cumulative discounted dividend payments until the moment of bankruptcy, which is taken to be the first time that the cash reserves (the cumulative net revenues minus cumulative dividend payments) are zero. We show that if the drift is positive in each state, it is optimal to adopt a barrier strategy at certain positive regime-dependent levels, and provide an explicit characterization of the value function as the fixed point of a contraction. In the case that the drift is small and negative in one state, the optimal strategy takes a different form, which we explicitly identify if there are two regimes. We also provide a numerical illustration of the sensitivities of the optimal barriers and the influence of regime switching.

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