Description: There is no right price for a piece of insurance. There is simply the transacted market price, which is high enough to bring forth sellers and low enough to induce buyers. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: Catastrophic insurance futures are being traded, albeit thinly, at the Chicago Board of Trade. This paper examines the broad context for trading insurance risk. The motivation for trading insurance risks, specifically to increase the capacity to cover risk, is discussed. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: Discusses the optimal consumption strategy in the presence of default risk. It highlights the Regime-Switching model, which indicates that the market situation may change and the distribution of an asset's return will change over time.

Description: Shareholders provide capital and receive the insurance profit. This paper demonstrates than an optimal capital level exists that generates the highest return for the shareholders of an insurance company. This result is derived using a risk capital model by Perold. The no-arbitrage argument, developed by Modigliani and Miller, is used throughout the paper and puts the discussion on a solid economic footing. From 2006 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS06-1.

Description: Economic Scenario Generator - Investment Section Web Series - Risk Neutral

Description: The concept of crosshedging gives us the key to the actuarial understanding of most new tools arising in the area of alternative risk transfer mechanisms. Securitization of insurance, which is the theme of this symposium can, as I see it, almost always be seen as an exercise in crosshedging. The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: We derive formulas for calculating the premiums that should be charged on policies in a discounted cash flow model with tax reserves and required assets that are determined by regulation. We also determine the unique division of required assets into “reserves” and “capital” that allows the product profitability to be correctly evaluated. That is, the profit after capital charges is zero if the product achieves the return assumed in pricing. We illustrate the concepts using whole life insurance and guaranteed minimum death benefit examples.

Description: This paper reviews the main methodological questions underlying the theoretical pricing of catastrophe insurance futures. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI978-1.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: This article gives an overview of the CFO Forum diversification paper. The key points that the CFO Forum made are: 1. The lack of sufficient diversifying strategies for risk management needs to be addressed. Therefore they provided a policy framework that promotes sound risk measurement and management practices in a way that can be implemented and supervised with confidence. 2. The lack of sufficient regulatory over-site needs to be addressed, so they presented a set of core principles to form the basis of European insurance regulation. These core principle incorporate diversification in a consistent manner.