A note on scale functions and the time value of ruin for Lévy insurance risk processes

We examine discounted penalties at ruin for surplus dynamics driven by a general spectrally negative Lévy process; the natural class of stochastic processes which contains many examples of risk processes which have already been considered in the existing literature. Following from the important contributions of [Zhou, X., 2005. On a classical risk model with a constant dividend barrier. North Am. Act. J. 95–108] we provide an explicit characterization of a generalized version of the Gerber–Shiu function in terms of scale functions, streamlining and extending results available in the literature.