In May 2026, Prof. Dr. Despoina Makariou was invited to do a research talk on pricing dynamics in catastrophe bond issuance, which was conducted in collaboration with Pauline Barrieu and Yining Chen from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
The study examines pricing dynamics in the issuance of catastrophe bonds, an increasingly important instrument for transferring and managing catastrophe risks between insurance and capital markets.
The research subsequently received third prize at the 13th Conference in Actuarial Science and Finance on Samos, recognizing its contribution to current research in actuarial science, insurance, and finance.
The Conference in Actuarial Science and Finance on Samos has been held every two years for 26 years and provides an international forum for state-of-the-art research in actuarial science, insurance, finance, and risk management.
The 13th conference was hosted by the Department of Statistics and Actuarial–Financial Mathematics at the University of the Aegean and jointly organized with KU Leuven’s Department of Applied Economics and Department of Mathematics, the University of Copenhagen’s Laboratory of Actuarial Mathematics, and Columbia University’s Department of Statistics.