Optimal Dividends Paid in a Foreign Currency for a Lévy Insurance Risk Model

Abstract: This paper considers an optimal dividend distribution problem for an insurance company where the dividends are paid in a foreign currency. In the absence of dividend payments, our risk process follows a spectrally negative L\'evy process. We assume that the exchange rate is described by a an exponentially L\'evy process, possibly containing the same risk sources like the surplus of the insurance company under consideration. The control mechanism chooses the amount of dividend payments. The objective is to maximise the expected dividend payments received until the time of ruin and a penalty payment at the time of ruin, which is an increasing function of the size of the shortfall at ruin. A complete solution is presented to the corresponding stochastic control problem. Via the corresponding Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman equation we find the necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality of a single dividend barrier strategy. A number of numerical examples illustrate the theoretical analysis.