Description: Presented at May 2002 Spring Meeting. This session covers the current status of FAS 133 and extensions such as the proposed statement of position on accounting and reporting by insurance enterprises for certain nontraditional, long-duration contracts and for separate accounts.

Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: In 1993, the Chicago Board of Trade introduced a futures contract on a financial index that reflects the insurance claims emerging from catastrophes in a portfolio of policies. This article presents a valuation formula for the contract, under the assumption that catastrophes emerge as a Poisson process over time and that the claims from each catastrophe emerge as a Compound Poisson process. The formula is developed by taking conditional expectations with respect to a history of information that includes knowledge about the time of the catastrophes.

Description: The goal of this paper is to dispel the prevailing belief that American-style options cannot be valued efficiently in a simulation model by presenting a general algorithm for such valuation, and thus remove what has been considered a major impediment to the use of simulation models for valuing financial instruments. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: Introduction to option pricing, with special attention to issues in applying these tools to price equity-linked insurance products. Clear, accessible explanation of key results of mathematical finance including risk-neutral valuation.

Description: Presented at June 1996 Spring Meeting. Provides overview of modern pricing of assets such as derivatives. It includes theory and practical applications, particularly how they relate to insurance companies.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Numerical Finance. This paper introduces and illustrates a new version of the Monte Carl method that has attractive properties for the numerical valuation of derivatives. The traditional Monte Carlo method has proven to be a powerful and flexible tool for many types of derivatives calculations.

Description: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. In this teaching session, various forms of asset-backed securities, e.g., credit cards, auto, home equity, commercial real estate, mobile homes, etc., are examined. Also discussed is basic structures and the risks and opportunities and critical parameters involved.

Description: Introduction to option pricing using Black-Scholes. Discussion on the limitations of Black-Scholes and of its alternatives such as Heston. Clear, accessible explanation of key results of mathematical finance including risk-neutral valuation.

Description: From a panel discussion session at the 2000 Valuation Actuary Symposium held in Washington DC, September 14-15, 2000 Overview of New York Regulation 163, including the limits on different types of derivative activities, the Derivative Use Plan required by New York, and the reporting and control requirements.