Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: Improve pharmacy cost forecasting by developing induced demand curves for pharmacy costs.

Description: A recent SOA regional meeting featured discussion on an age-old actuarial debate: Within the same company, should the return on equity ROE target vary by profit center PC depending upon the risk of the PC?

Description: Risk based pricing addresses some of the shortcomings of traditional pricing methods by providing a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between shareholder risks and rewards using a robust, transparent and objective economic methodology that is consistent across products.

Description: This article reviews some of the highlights of th 2010 SOA Annual meeting including the impact on pricing resulting from Solvency II, Market Consistent Valuation of New Business - MCVNB, the latest on mortality, Standards of Practice in product development, managing risk in product design and a regulation update.

Description: This paper studies how changes in the fractions of various groups of individuals, the survival probabilities of various types and the attitudes towards risks of the customers affect the equilibrium price of annuity contracts. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1989 Vol. 2.

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: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: Discussion of possible hedging strategies for offsetting the investment risk for variable annuities, especially those with guaranteed benefits.

Description: This paper first derives the fair participation rate based on a fair value of the equity-indexed annuity EIA. Then using risk measures, a new participation rate is obtained, based on the tail loading of the hedging error distribution. Risk management strategies reducing risk related to the hedging error are also presented. A detailed numerical analysis is performed for a point-to-point EIA.