Description: This session covers stochastic modeling processes currently in use and explores others that may be beneficial to health actuaries. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 31, No. 2, Session 76

Description: This paper illustrates a current approach to capital allocation, referred to herein as Tail Contribution Analysis TCA, using it to evaluate the impact of changes in an insurer’s operations by allocating capital to individual lines of business. It then highlights a common problem in the implementation of the procedure arising from reserve volatility and briefly notes the failure of the methodology to account for a firm’s changing levels of risk under various strategies. Finally, it introduces an alternative method for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. We will 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, we will illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: Panelists discuss economic capital, capital modeling, and hedge modeling, especially for guaranteed living benefits [GLBs] on variable annuities. Session 34PD of the 2005 Valuation Actuary Symposium.

Description: Describes using the new multi-risk scenario generator to create sensitivity tests at moderately adverse probability levels, resulting in margins to use for PBR.

Description: The article discusses that drawbacks of the HJM Heath-Jarrow-Morton class of stochastic interest models and suggests the use of the Longstaff-Schwartz string model. It describes the use and benefits of the Lonstaff-Schwartz string model.

Description: This paper presents a new methodology for obtaining fast algorithms and closed form solutions for pricing callable bonds in continuous time models. Results are directly applicable to regulatory scenario testing, immunization and market value accounting.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that presents preliminary observations with respect to probabilistic fuzzy systems.

Description: The article warns against treating the results of a stochastic model with more deference than other actuarial analysis, and describes some hidden risks involved with choice of model and calibration.

Description: This article deals with enterprise risk management and how the techniques contained within the discipline can help prevent unforeseen large mistakes in strategy, product design, and product management

Description: In the copula literature there are many bivariate distribution families but very few higher dimensional ones. Moreover, most of these are difficult to work with. Some of the bivariate families can be extended to more dimensions but in general the construction of distribution functions with more than two variables is a difficult problem. This paper introduces a construction method that is straightforward to implement and can produce multivariate distribution functions of any dimension.