Description: Recent advances in mortality modeling have enabled applicant-specific quantification of mortality risk in life insurance applicants using laboratory and physical measurements. Relative to more conventional underwriting, this approach identifies a small population of significantly under-priced policy and a much larger, cross-subsidizing group whose risk is presently overestimated. Applicants placed in the highest percentile by this scoring methodology are more than 10X as likely to die in a given period as their demographic peers, and represent approximately 5% of short-term claims. Implications for product design are substantial in both the short- and long-term, as the possibilities for adverse selection grow, and the opportunity for fully individualized pricing raises the more distant prospect of products with as many rate classes as applicants.

Description: This article provides guidelines for practitioners of risk management. These guidelines fall under four general headings: 1. Understanding and fulfilling your role in the organization. 2. General risk management. 3. The use of derivatives. 4. Risk measurement systems.

Description: This paper defines a concept of equivalence for profit standards. The central principle advanced is that the company should set prices on all its products to produce marginal profits that are equal in proportion to the products' marginal use of surplus. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1981, Vol. 33.

Description: The author, noting the inadequacy of traditional ‘rules of thumb’ used for profit objectives, demonstrates that, assuming a stock life insurance company’s objective is to maximize its current value, the profit objective can be expressed as maximizing ‘the present value of book profits per unit of limiting constraint.’ Includes discussion and author’s review of discussion. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1983 Volume 35.

Description: Actuarial appraisals are performed using discounted cash-flow models. Using local market insurance accounting standards, an appraisal model typically assumes annual after-tax distributable earnings that are repatriated to the investor. The various lines of business are modeled and validated individually and presented in separate sections of the appraisal report before being aggregated into a total company model. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: A framework to measure and evaluate the risk-adjusted investment performance given the characteristics of the insurance liability.

Description: Institutional investors seeking to hedge have no shortage of choices, and need the right framework to manage the different risks in portfolios as they arise. This article analyzes performance of different equity hedging strategies over the last 15 years, and lays out a potential hedging framework that takes into account types of risks being hedged, fundamental views, and current market pricing of protection.

Description: This article lists potential problems as a result of the elimination of Thirty-Year Treasury Auction Issue. Some problems mentioned are 1 discounting pension liabilities, 2 bond market 3 swap curve and 4 liquidity.

Description: A Balanced Outlook: The Latest Views of Jack Bogle

Description: This article presents recent developments and trends with respect to Economic Capital based on the work of the EC subgroup of the SOA's Risk Management Task Force.