As providers are considering accountable and value based care models, it is critical to strategically think through how to achieve a sustainable business model into the future. This requires actuarial and clinical/provider capabilities to assess the care management and financial levers to help a client through the transition.

This paper uses a mortality surge model to estimate the total financial impact on the U.S. insurance industry of a flu pandemic. It does not attempt to determine the probability of such a pandemic.

2007 SOA Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Washington DC. This session discussed the requirements for, the importance of, and and techniques for stress testing.

This paper discusses model risk, gives specific examples of how model risk can affect fixed-income portfolio valuation, and explains why risk measurement should involve stress testing of key modeling assumptions. If the results of a valuation or asset/liability analysis change dramatically given a small change in a modeling assumption, management may wish to reduce the firm's exposure to that risk factor, as absolute certainty in financial modeling is an unobtainable goal.

Over recent years Value at Risk VaR has been accepted in the financial world, and particularly in the banking world, as the yardstick with which to measure portfolio risk. This paper demonstrates the importance of stress testing the model results themselves. Such analyses are useful in order to highlight the underlying model assumptions, the reliability of the assumptions which have been made, and most importantly the effect on the end results if these assumptions were to change. Stress tests are carried out on a fictitious bank to show the sort of useful information and insight they can give.

This paper uses a Bayesian framework to compare discrete distributions for claim counts. It includes examples on 8 data sets.

Survey of appointed actuaries about asset adequacy testing techniques currently being used in 2012.

The author recommends the use of "minimally destructive scenarios" as part of an ORSA process, in order to deal with cognitive bias that can occur in risk decision-making. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Presentation at the 41st Actuarial Research Conference held on August 10-12, 2006 in Montreal, QC. This paper considers the problem of extending regime-switching models for asset returns to the situation with multiple asset markets. The conditional tail expectation CTE is highly sensitive to the assumed dependence structure between the regime models for the different markets. A Monte Carlo simulation is used to illustrate the cost of misspecification. The authors find that the model most commonly used by practitioners is worse than all of the alternatives that they investigate.

This article discusses challenges that short-term predictions have on actuaries' reputations, both as individuals and as a profession, and discusses strategies to improve our professionalism and better manage this risk.