Copulas Between Wealth and Lifetime

The life insurance industry is very interested in how a person’s lifetime is related to his wealth with financial advisors interested in how even a person’s portfolio choice affects his lifetime. This paper presents a statistical analysis combined with intuitive relationships between lifetime and wealth. Key properties of this relationship are given and then various copulas are analyzed to see whether they have these properties. Other advantages and disadvantages of these copulas for describing the dependence are stated. The results show that some copulas are not appropriate for relating lifetime and wealth, including the Gaussian family.