Presented at June 2007 Health Meeting. How should companies, and especially those involved in healthcare, plan for events like hurricanes and pandemics? Presenters provide an overview of catastrophes and discuss methods for modeling them with a particular focus on pandemics.

2012 SOA Health Meeting Session #29. Private Exchanges are gaining in momentum – but what are they and why should you care? Private Exchanges are run by private companies and do not have to offer the regulated and standardized products found in Public Exchanges. Employers who choose to offer a Private Exchange have many things to consider when making the leap from the traditional means of offering benefits to employees. Insurers who participate in a Private Exchange also must understand the risks involved with being offered in this new medium. This panel will address the following issues: Similarities and differences between Private and Public Exchanges. Why are employers interested in offering exchanges to their employees. What does it mean for an employer to send their employees to a Private Exchange versus a Public Exchange. Forecasting and underwriting issues for actuaries helping employers who are considering migrating to Private Exchange. Risk adjustment considerations in multi-carrier exchanges

Slides from a panel discussion at the Society of Actuaries 2010 Annual Meeting and Exhibit held in October 2010 in New York, NY. Discussion of the ever-changing and increasing demands being placed on the actuarial modeling area and how actuarial professionals are responding to these demands with new technical tools for more efficient modeling processes.

A widely accepted model in the insurance industry, the Excess Death Rate model, treats the excess as additive to the conditional probability of death for an insurance company’s unimpaired class.This paper tests the validity of that model versus other common predictive models of excess mortality in an insured population. There is a discussion of this paper by Grant Hemphill at the end of the paper. From NAAJ, October 2002, Volume 6, Number 4.

This paper presents models that assume that, at any time, a resident is given state, which is determined by the individual's care requirements. The resident may make transitions between states at various times, and randomness is associated with both the transition times and the states entered. Actuarial calculations using such a model are discussed, and numerical illustrations are provided. From NAAJ, January 1997, Volume 1, Number 1.

This paper presents a Gaussian multivariate factor model of the term structure of interest rates. It shows that there exists a martingale valuation law of the factors so that the price function of a zero-coupon bond is an exponential spline. The model's linear and Gaussian structure yields a simple model where estimation and calibration are relatively easy to do. From NAAJ, July 2001, Volume 5, Number 3.

This paper first derives the fair participation rate based on a fair value of the equity-indexed annuity EIA. Then using risk measures, a new participation rate is obtained, based on the tail loading of the hedging error distribution. Risk management strategies reducing risk related to the hedging error are also presented. A detailed numerical analysis is performed for a point-to-point EIA.

Equity-based Insurance Guarantees Conference, Boston, Oct 2008. This session focused on the assumptions and models typically used to price Guaranteed Minimum Withdrawal Benefit riders. Outline: 1. Product Design 2. Risk Management 3. Base VA features 4. Key modeling considerations 5. Overview of price drivers 6. Price and hedge cost 7. Volatility risk: Solution to cut price 8. Dealing with Basis Risk 9. Lapses: best estimate or market price?

This presentation from The Modeling of Financial Market Risks for Financial Institutions Seminar describes the experiences from a case study on implementing a stochastic approach to fixed income investing incorporating liability analysis.

In this paper we give new general criteria for the weak convergence of one-dimensional distributions of generalized risk processes and describe the class of possible limit laws under an infinite growth of stochastic portfolio size and stochastic intensity of insurance payment.