Where the moment-generating function is finite in a neighborhood of zero, define the cumulant-generating function and the th cumulant by . Differentiation gives
since . Thus the first two cumulants are the mean and variance.
Conditional on , independence gives . Summing over the Poisson distribution yields
Hence the compound Poisson cumulants give
For the moment statements, finite second moments suffice even when a moment-generating function does not exist near zero: conditioning gives . This distinguishes the raw second moment from the variance of an individual claim.
For a single flood, the law of total expectation and law of total variance similarly give
Condition on the number of floods and apply the same laws once more. All floods have these moments and are independent of , so the annual total satisfies
The additional term is the variation in the number of entire flood clusters; it would be lost by treating individual claims as an ordinary Poisson stream.
For the annual count , its probability generating function is
This is the nested Poisson flood count. Differentiating, or conditioning on , gives and . Thus is not Poisson when , since its variance exceeds its mean. If either parameter is zero it is identically zero, a degenerate Poisson distribution.
Let be the number of valid claims in flood . Independent validity marking gives . Its generating function is
so Poisson thinning gives . With validity independent also of claim amount, each claim contributes expected paid amount . Therefore the annual expected payment is . The independent-mark assumption is needed for this multiplication; a size-dependent invalidity rule would require the joint expected value of amount and validity instead.
Let . Conditioning on gives
Where the moment-generating function is finite around zero, differentiating the cumulant-generating function gives
In particular and . These compound Poisson cumulants use raw claim moments. The first two formulas also follow by conditioning: and , so
This is the law of total variance. They therefore remain valid with finite first two moments even when no positive exponential moment exists.
Under per-claim excess of loss reinsurance, put and let be the positive part of the excess. The insurer and reinsurer totals are sums of these payments over the same Poisson distribution count. Write . Using the tail integral formula for moments on the tail probabilities of and gives
For example, after , and shifting by gives the reinsurer formula. The moment formulas are finite whenever the corresponding claim moments are finite.
For the specified Pareto distribution, with shape three and minimum ,
If , every claim exceeds the reinsurance retention. Therefore
If , the tail integrals instead give
Consequently the requested sum of variances is
On the first branch, ; it decreases until and then increases. On the second branch . For the minimum is unique; if , all variances are zero and every reinsurance retention minimizes them. Thus
The curve starts at , reaches this minimum, passes through with matching slope on both branches, and then increases concavely toward the horizontal asymptote . The variance-minimizing retention for shape-three Pareto claims is shown below.
Figure 1.
Sum of insurer and reinsurer aggregate variances for shape-three Pareto claims, minimized at retention three quarters of the minimum claim size
. Details.
The two aggregate payouts are dependent. Conditioning on the common count gives covariance , so for every reinsurance retention, as required by . The covariance of two components of a compound Poisson sum accounts for this distinction between a sum of variances and the variance of a sum.
There is a moment domain qualification for this heavy-tailed example. For every , , and moments of order also diverge. Thus its positive moment-generating function is not finite and higher finite cumulants cannot be obtained by differentiating around zero. Its mean and variance calculations above are valid by conditioning or by the first two right derivatives at zero of the Laplace transform of a nonnegative random variable.