Description: The author explores and argues against the “evolution of thinking” and the position that actuarial thinking is a blend of all three modes of thinking, as discussed by Dave Ingram in the February/March 2012 issue of The Actuary.

Description: This article discusses the recent low interest rate environment and the asset-liability management challenges it presents for insurers. With respect to products such as deferred annuities, universal life and settlement options, it introduces the more robust duration measure called effective duration, which is the product of option-adjusted analysis OAA.

Description: Discusses the influence of market-consistent pricing proponents.

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 paper shows how the results of copula based capital aggregation models can always be locally approximated by relatively simple formulas. The paper defines the concepts of diversification factor and tail correlation matrix and describes methods for estimating these quantities from simulated data. We show how these ideas can be put into practice as both computational shortcuts and presentation tools.

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.