Description: Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. Long-term care LTC insurance is frequently not covered by national social insurance programs. When costs are expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, the future burden of financing LTC would not lead to unbearable tax levels and is not particularly large in comparison to the projected costs for pensions and health care. After identifying the breadth of definitions of LTC needs, it is argued that LTC is an insurable risk. The paper concludes that LTC social insurance is affordable in developed countries.

Description: Delinquency rates are closely related to the economic conditions and can be analyzed using measures of economic growth and stability. In an attempt to predict the delinquency rate for the health care equipment financial industry, we investigated the relationship between delinquency rate and key macroeconomic variables for the period from 1998 to 2008. The study reveals that the tightening credit standards and unemployment rate are the key macroeconomic indicators influencing the delinquency rate. The analysis further helps in arriving at a trigger to monitor the delinquency rate based on the macroeconomic indicators, thus enabling proactive portfolio management. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Teaching enterprise risk management ERM in higher educational institutions as a mainstream subject is emerging. Risk management is traditionally taught in disciplinary silos without considering the multidimensional aspects of risk necessary to steer the entire business. This study identifies and focuses on the essential elements to develop a curriculum of ERM from a multidisciplinary perspective. The purpose of this article is to outline the contents of an ERM unit for academic business degrees. The article includes the author’s view and experience in designing and delivering an ERM unit for a postgraduate finance and risk management degree at his current academic affiliation. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 symposium, January 2011. This paper investigates dynamic properties of age trajectories of physiological indices and their effects on mortality risk and longevity using longitudinal data on more than 5,000 individuals collected in biannual examinations of the Framingham Heart Study original age group during about 50 subsequent years of follow up.

Description: Guaranteed Annuity Options GAOs are options available to holders of certain pension policies. This paper studies GAOs using two models for the interest rate the Vasicek and the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross models. An actuarial approach is used to value the GAOs and compared with the value of a replicating portfolio.

Description: This paper investigates the optimal multi-period proportional reinsurance strategy that minimizes the ruin probability of an insurer. Some conditions under which it is optimal to have no reinsurance are derived. Based on these results, a new concept, capital threshold of proportional reinsurance, is introduced. In the case of two periods, a lower bound of the capital threshold of proportional reinsurance is provided. Some economic implications and properties of this new concept are also discussed.

Description: This article examines how parameter uncertainty leads to uncertainty in Value at Risk VaR estimates. Lacking a closed form solution, we use a first order approximation of VaR to map parameter changes into changes in the VaR value. When the asymptotic distribution of parameter estimates is normal, this implies a normal approximation of the confidence interval about VaR. We describe this approximation in detail and explore some extensions to risk factor modeling.

Description: This paper demonstrates that using a conditional probability approach to analyzing investment data yields investment forecast and stock option pricing models which more closely match actual market data, and it demonstrates the impact that conditional probabilities could have on CAPM beta and risk premia calculations. Reprinted from: Journal of Financial and Economic Practice, Vol. 6 No. 2 Spring 2006.

Description: October 2010 issue of the Technology Section newsletter, CompAct.

Description: July 2010 issue of the Technology Section newsletter, CompAct.

Description: The current financial model put forth as the market value of public sector pension benefit liabilities is simply the expected cash flows of the accumulated benefit obligation, as defined for current private sector financial reporting, discounted using a risk-free yield curve. This model is in serious need of an overhaul. This monograph addresses this issue.

Description: Paper presents two alternative practices that could promote fuller recognition of a plan’s investment risks and that take into account the long-term nature of the benefit promises of maturing retirement systems.

Description: Download the papers from the 2009 Public Pension Finance Symposium.

Description: The article presents a number of approaches to communicating and discussing risk with employer and retirement board members.

Description: Paper that explores some characteristics of pension plans that affect the type and amount of investment risk a government-sponsored pension plan can afford.

Description: Part 1 proposes solutions to the first of three flaws of the current financial model to obtaining the fair value of the public sector employer’s pension benefit liability.

Description: May 2010, issue 28 of the Actuary of the Future newsletter published by the Actuary of the Future Section of the Society of Actuaries.

Description: The full electronic newsletter of the Technology Section of the Society of Actuaries, April 2010 issue 35.

Description: Life Insurance 2020 Foresight e-book of essays including introduction

Description: Response to Life Insurance 2020 Foresight – A Call for Essays. An essay stating the author’s vision for the future of the life insurance sector. Some smaller companies might focus on smaller niche markets rather than compete with larger companies in the broader markets.

Description: Discussant comments for the 2009 Housing Wealth monograph paper, “Home Equity and At-Need Annuities—A Dynamic Long-Term Care Funding Duo”. The author finds that the ideas discussed in this paper should stimulate more thinking about financial products and public sector programs and how they can better serve older homeowners.

Description: This paper describes the prevalence of the still uninsured long-term care financial risk, and how the at-need annuity/home equity combination can address long term care needs.

Description: Author’s response to discussant comments for the 2009 Housing Wealth monograph paper, “Home Equity and At-Need Annuities—A Dynamic Long-Term Care Funding Duo”. The paper describes the prevalence of the still uninsured long-term care financial risk, and how the at-need annuity/home equity combination can address long term care needs.

Description: Abstract for “Home Equity and At-Need Annuities—A Dynamic Long-Term Care Funding Duo.” This paper describes the prevalence of the still uninsured long-term care financial risk, and how the at-need annuity/home equity combination can address long term care needs.

Description: An essay discussing universal access to high quality, low cost health care.

Description: Essay discussing cost, quality and access of healthcare and then describes the need for rationing.

Description: A call for essays issued by the SOA Health and Long Term Care Sections on the visions for the future of the U.S. health care system.

Description: The aim of this work is the definition of a holistic approach to assess the maturity level of ERM within an organization, following the principles defined by The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission 2004b in the “Enterprise Risk Management—Integrated Framework.”

Description: This paper discusses both the theoretical and the application aspects of stress testing in managing enterprise risks. Effective stress testing maximizes the risk adjusted enterprise profit by controlling major risks financial, strategic, operational and hazard upon identifying risk metrics and modeling the correlations. A case study is included for demonstration purposes.

Description: Fraud is often a dynamic and challenging problem in credit card lending business. Supervised modeling/segmentation techniques are commonly used in fraud detection to distinguish risky transactions from non-risky transactions. However, these techniques frequently rely on identifying risky behavior at a global level. In this paper, along with the classical approach, a new technique has been studied to improve the behavioral fraud detection capability. The application of this proposed technique enables us to identify risky behavior at the account level.

Description: The paper focuses on value creation for European health insurance companies through the practical application of integrated ERM frameworks.

Description: Much of the push for ERM has come from regulators and rating agencies, but it is being applied in internal company decision-making as well. This paper reviews the progress made and the needs still outstanding in two key areas of application: optimal capital level for an insurer and risk-adjusted profitability of business units. The basic conclusion is that progress has been made in these areas, but more is needed. Building models is not emphasized—it will be assumed that a state-of-the art model is available. The emphasis is on using such models in decision-making.

Description: This is a concluding and encompassing part of our research on the project entitled \Weighted Premium Calculation Principles and Risk Capital Allocations, which has been supported by the Actuarial Education and Research Fund AERF and the Society of Actuaries Committee on Knowledge Extension Research CKER. We explore the concept of weighted distributions and their role in various phenomena occurring in insurance and finance. In particular, we relate weighted distributions to actuarial and economic premium calculation principles, and also to the capital asset pricing model CAPM. Imitating the latter, we propose a weighted insurance pricing model WIPM. Although general in formulation, we show that the WIPM can successfully be evaluated in a variety of situations, which we illustrate with a number of examples.

Description: Property and casualty insurers face risks in many key areas, such as operations, natural catastrophes and underwriting. Among the underwriting risks is the potential financial impact of adverse loss reserves development.This paper illustrates a model of loss reserve risk that will incorporate how risk evolves over time at annual time horizons.

Description: This article sees enterprise risk management as a specific application of knowledge in Order to control deviations from strategic objectives, shareholders’ values and stakeholders’ relationships. Before and after a modeling process it is necessary to find insights into how the application of knowledge management processes can improve the understanding of risk and the implementation of enterprise risk management. The article presents a proposed methodology to contribute to providing a guide for developing risk modeling knowledge and a reduction of knowledge silos, in order to improve the quality and quantity of solutions related to risk inquiries across the organization.

Description: The author will show that risk management is more than combining several processes and methods it is much more a company wide approach that enables an open dealing with chances and risks, requiring a change in culture, governance and decision rules across the whole organizations.

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.

Description: May 2009 issue of the Actuary of the Future Section newsletter The Actuary of the Future

Description: This paper looks at the problem of valuing and managing the ALM risks associated with insurance liabilities that are too long to be matched by available investments. Two options were explored and the paper concludes by arguing that the Static Control Model leads to more useful ALM strategies for long liabilities.

Description: This paper starts from the viewpoint that enterprise risk management [ERM] is a specific application of knowledge in order to control deviations from strategic objectives, shareholders’ values and stakeholders’ relationships. This study is looking for insights into how the application of knowledge management processes can improve the implementation of ERM.

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: This paper discusses some of the models used to quantify risk, note some areas where improvements in standard methods are needed, and in some cases suggest alternative approaches for risks in Property and Casualty Insurance and Life Insurance.

Description: This paper focuses on business risks rather than market, credit and operational risks. The author proposes a bottom-up approach for modelling and measuring business risk where the dynamic of the underlying earnings is described in a continuous-time model.

Description: This paper explains the development of the credit derivative market, describes the most common types of credit derivatives, discusses how insurers can and do use these instruments and explains the role they played in the financial market turmoil of 2008.

Description: Full article listing of the 2006 Enterprise Risk Management symposium.

Description: This is the full version of the CompAct newsletter, published April 2009, Issue No. 31.

Description: This paper offers a decision making procedure for solving complex problems step by step. It presents the decision analysis process for both public and private decision making, using different decision criteria, different types of information, and information of varying quality.

Description: January 2009 issue of the Technology Section newsletter, CompAct

Description: Download the papers from the "Defining the Characteristics of the 21st Century Retirement System" monograph.

Description: This is a web page containing links to papers presented at the Retirement 20/20 conference held in Washington, D.C. on November 17 & 18, 2008.

Description: The research investigates the challenges associated with determining a “fair value” assessment for embedded options in two product types and incorporates the process into product pricing and liability valuation

Description: This paper develops credibility using a longitudinal data framework. In a longitudinal data framework, one might encounter data from a cross-section of risk classes towns with a history of insurance claims available for each risk class. For the marginal claims distributions, we use generalized linear models, an extension of linear regression that also encompasses Weibull and Gamma regressions. Copulas are used to model the dependencies over time specifically, this paper is the first to propose using a t-copula in the context of generalized linear models. The t-copula is the copula associated with the multivariate t-distribution like univariate t-distributions, it seems especially suitable for empirical work. Moreover, we show that the t-copula gives rise to easily computable predictive distributions that we use to generate credibility predictors. Like Bayesian methods, our copula credibility prediction methods allow us to provide an entire distribution of predicted claims, not just a point prediction.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society CAS and the Society of Actuaries SOA, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research.

Description: The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utilize natural hedging have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging to a firm that writes only one of the lines of business.

Description: This paper discusses the theoretic framework of modeling captial markets: index-based composition methodology and statisical procedure of model construction and extension: wavelets-based financial signal processing technique. It also discusses the implications and applications, measuring the market uncertainty and volatility highlighting the S&P 500 as an example.

Description: This paper examines some new Bayesian models for loss reserving inspired by a consideration of some of the methods and techniques appearing in the traditional chain ladder literature. This includes a possibly order restricted hierarchical Bayesian model for the year over year development factors. The issues of reserve variability and ranges of reasonable reserve estimates are considered. A new Bornhuetter-Ferguson styled Bayesian method of estimate revision is also discussed. These Bayesian models can be implemented using Markov chain Monte Carlo MCMC methods in a variety of programming languages, and can serve as starting points for more advanced models. This paper describes their implementation in WinBUGS a specialized software program for MCMC simulations. Illustrative WinBUGS code is included.

Description: This paper illustrates the application of stochastic control methods in managing the risk associated with an insurance business. We present the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman HJB equation and demonstrate its use in finding the optimal investment strategy based on some given criteria. Here we consider an insurance business with a fixed amount available for investment in a portfolio consisting of one non-risky asset and one risky asset. The object of the resulting control problem is to determine the investment strategy that minimizes infinite time ruin probability. The existence of a solution to the resulting HJB equation is shown. The relevant verification lemma is not presented in this paper and a numerical algorithm is given instead. Examples applied to exponential claims are also presented.

Description: Securitization of mortality risks is an alternative risk management tool that may have some advantages over reinsurance. The purpose of this paper is to study mortality-based securities, such as swaps and mortality bonds, and to price the proposed mortality securities. We focus on group life annuity data, although the techniques could be applied to other lines of annuity or life insurance.

Description: Abstract for the 2008 ERM Monograph paper, “Multivariate Dependence Modeling Using Pair-Copulas”.

Description: Abstract for the 2008 ERM Monograph paper, “Behavioral Fraud Mitigation through Trend Offsets”.

Description: Enterprise risk management ERM is for the measurement and the management of all significant risks of the business holistically irrespective of types and sources. The study offers significant advances in the current debate on the performance of enterprise risk management, in particular, minimizing the existing gap between the academic understanding and practitioners’ experience on the topic.

Description: This paper investigates the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risk type, which can be thought of as market risk. We analytically calculate their inter-risk correlation and show how inter-risk correlation bounds can be derived.

Description: This paper examines the fundamental principles underlying the theory of rate change. The proposed approach shows improved accuracy as compared to current methods, with particular significance for a non-static book of business.

Description: This paper argues that living longer with dignity is what is desirable and also that this should be an objective in designing specific social support systems for the elderly. The paper identifies and discusses certain areas where dignity is lacking or where the likelihood of living with dignity could be enhanced.

Description: Transcript of the Q&A period from session 2A.

Description: This paper presents recent trends in obesity prevalence in significant population segments, including overall effects by age, gender and certain racial and ethnic groups, and discusses the ways in which obesity can influence mortality in each of these segments. It provides a synthesis of reported mortality experience relating to these behaviors by risk factors and diseases that will affect any mortality projection.

Description: This paper develops the binomial version of the Lee-Carter model and provides a comparative study of simulation strategies for assessing risk in mortality rate predictions and associated estimates of life expectancy and annuity values in both period and cohort frameworks.

Description: We propose an age-shift model to modify the LC model and deal with the problem of parameters. The proposed method attains smaller estimation errors with respect to mean absolute percentage error or mean square error. We also apply the proposed age-shift model to the mortality rates of these four countries to evaluate the longevity risk in annuity products by measuring life expectancy.

Description: This paper proposes a new method to price the longevity risk premia in order to tackle the pricing obstacle. Based on the equivalent utility pricing principle, our method obtains the minimum risk premium required by the longevity insurance seller and the maximum acceptable risk premium by the longevity insurance buyer.

Description: Full version of Actuary of the Future newsletter, Issue No. 23, November 2007.

Description: This is the full version of the Actuary of the Future newsletter, published May 2007, Issue No. 22.

Description: As an alternative to the widely-used 'return on economic capital' RAROC, this paper proposes a performance measure consistent with standard valuation models, and discusses its implications for prudential regulation. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: The objective of this paper is to explore the issues necessary to develop an integrated model of operational risk (OR) and financial risk (FR) within the framework of enterprise risk management (ERM). From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: Robert Morris University's Department of Mathematics invites applications for a permanent/full–time position at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor of Mathematics (and/or) Actuarial Science beginning fall 2007.

Description: This is the full version of the CompAct electronic newsletter, published October 2006, Issue No. 21.