Laura González-Vila Puchades, PhD in Economics and Business Sciences from the University of Barcelona is the recipient of the 2020 Rafael Termes Research and Study Awards.

The prize is awarded annually by the Spanish Institute of Financial Analysts and, on this occasion, has been given to the professor of the Department of Economic, Financial and Actuarial Mathematics of the UB for the monograph “Improved Income and Financial Planning: Merkel longevity coverage for retired people with reduced life expectancy”.

As a member of the Financial and Actuarial Modelling research group, she developed the award-winning work with Jorge de Andrés Sánchez, lecturer at Rovira i Virgili University (URV). This study analyses the insurance sector in Spain, which only offers survival annuities obtained from mortality tables for the general population. In this way, the IRPF tax incentives for the contracting of annuities complementary to the public retirement pension are a comparative disadvantage for people with reduced life expectancy, because they can only benefit from it at unfair prices.

To mitigate this disadvantage, the winning paper determines the optimal strategy that, considering health status and taxation, allows a pensioner with a low life expectancy to transfer his longevity risk by acquiring a supplementary income in our market.