Description: Read the August 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Statistics were invented to describe heterogeneity and are now applied to tackle alea. It may not be appropriate. Let's clarify their field of relevance.

Description: Essays advocating for incentive compensation linked to the level of risk in an organization.

Description: The underlying premise of this paper is that enterprise risk management (ERM), as it continues to evolve as both a process and a collection of risk management techniques, can benefit from several different (but ultimately somewhat related) “megatrends.” The core of this paper concentrates on the impact on ERM of one of those megatrends: the emergence of a behavioral economics perspective, which is beginning to have a large impact on our understanding of the economy and on certain economic and business processes. The evolution and context of behavioral economics are described, and potential implications for the practice of ERM are discussed. The paper culminates with a variety of specific suggestions for ERM practice in response to findings from behavioral economics research, specifically a number of human cognitive dissonances inconsistent with traditional economic theory.

Description: The article is Part 1 of two articles that provide a case study for the development of a profitability and risk dashboard. The sample dashboard provides distilled information regarding actual to expected (A/E) ratios for key risks, agent quality scores and customer value scores. The dashboard would also provide the value of new business written, surplus strain, debit balances, and expected losses on debit balances at different levels, down to the agent level. A product mix index is provided, together with visual comparisons of key metrics to the company's business plan. The Part 2 article will add information to the dashboard regarding risk margins, target capital, and company value.

Description: The author encourages the use of sound actuarial principles to develop reasonable retirement spending budgets instead of rule of thumb approaches commonly used.

Description: This paper provides an overview of those cognitive biases most often responsible for flawed risk assessments and provides practical techniques to mitigate them. Through a combination of mathematical rigor, case study, metaphor, and logic, the author highlights systematic errors in our thinking about risk and provides ways to avoid them.

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

Description: Highlights and discussion of "Stretching the Corridor: The Effects of Extended Rate Stabilization on Defined Benefit Plan Funding Requirements." The report, produced by the SOA Data-drive In-House Research function, analyzed the effects of extending the pension funding stabilization provisions that were implemented with MAP-21 in 2012.

Description: From the 2010 Long Term Care Think Tank Session, a summary on the activities and findings of the Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks, which focuses on understanding and mechanisms to assist in the distribution phase of retirement, by developing middle market consumer profiles, managing post-retirement risks, surveys and studies.