Description: ERM has methodology for quantifying the risk to capital, but to determine optimal capital, the impact of capital level on firm value is needed. This gets into the realm of valuation. Also capital allocation provides risk quantification for business units, but comparing return among units is fundamentally a risk-pricing exercise. When considering risk pricing, optimal returns on allocated capital are not necessarily constant across business units. The current ERM methodology, as well as actuarial literature on valuation and pricing, are reviewed, and possible directions for application of pricing and valuation methods to risk management problems are outlined.

Description: Presented at October 1985 Annual Meeting. Discusses risk measurement and quantification, cash-flow-based surplus, factors that affect benchmark surplus, how multiple risks can be combined for benchmark surplus, benchmark surplus and the valuation actuary, and uses of benchmark surplus formulas.

Description: Metadata for entire issue

Description: Presented at September 1994 Valuation Actuary Symposium. Discusses analyzing and projecting financial risk in group health plans.

Description: This paper introduces a rich stochastic modeling framework for understanding risks in multiple-decrement contracts. The example in the paper is a 20-year Term insurance contract. Not only are mortality and lapsation considered stochastic, but the parameters governing them are. For example, mortality risk is composed of four risk elements, including error generated in the underwriting process, volatility around the best estimate, catastrophic events that impact mortality, and the trend in mortality improvement or deterioration. When stochastically modeled, the relative contribution and risk profile of each risk element can be evaluated. Generating stochastic mortality results provides a distribution of results that an organization faces and the severity and incidence of the tail events.

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: This paper is Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2, “An Alternative Approach to Capital Allocation,” discusses using risk-replicating techniques that directly calculate the cost of capital. Such techniques can be used as a substitute for capital allocation. This paper expands upon current capital analysis by introducing a practical approach that considers the objectives of all stakeholders of an insurance company in setting appropriate capital targets.

Description: Presented at June 1986 Spring Meeting. This session discussion is about the National Association Of Insurance Commissioners' Early Warning System, A.M. Best Company ratios, Conning and Company solvency ratios, and California Department of Insurance Empirical ratios.

Description: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: Feature article discussing the IASB’s and FASB’s introduction of the use of other comprehensive income (OCI) to report certain changes in the value of insurance contracts.