Description: This paper considers the distribution of aggregate claims of an insurer. The general form of the distribution is considered initially, and, after a few mild restrictions are imposed, it is characterized as being a compound distribution. Followed by one submitted discussion paper.

Description: Discusses smaller company issues: retention limits policies, choosing type of company to reinsure with and basis for reinsurance, use of catastrophe and stop-loss coverages, and simplified reinsurance administrative methods.

Description: Paper discussing issues pertaining to setting and managing issue limits and reinsurance retention limits for life insurance.

Description: In summary, the goal of this report is to foster better industry-wide education, training and practice that decreases the future range and scope of what leading risk management professionals will henceforth label as being unpredictable as events now commonly thought to be so.

Description: Research project that reviewed and inventoried the range of quality and efficiency measures that demonstrate the performance of hospitals and physicians. Besides outlining key areas of consideration for quality and efficiency measurement, this report also describes future opportunities for actuaries and other health professionals interested in this evolving area. The inventory part of this report is in a separate document.

Description: In his original monograph on portfolio selection, Markowitz [1952] discusses the tradeoff between the mean and variance of a portfolio. Since then, especially recently, much attention has been focused on asymmetric distributions to minimize risks with given return goal for investors who have special skewness preferences. To address this issue, this paper extends Krokhmal et al. [2002]’s approach by adding CVaR-like constraints to the traditional portfolio optimization problem. The CVaR optimization technique has the advantage of reshaping either the left or right tail of a distribution while not significantly affecting the other. Specifically, this approach is used to manage the skewness of asset-liability portfolios of financial institutions. In addition, the CVaR-like constraints approach is compared with traditional Markowitz method and some other alternatives such as, the CVaR approach [directly optimize CVaR], the Boyle-Ding approach as well as the mean-absolute deviation [MAD] approach. Numerical analysis provides empirical support for the superiority of CVaR-like constraints approach in terms of skewness improvement of mean-variance portfolios.

Description: Studies default risk through the two-sided exit problem of a time-homogeneous di§usion process with tax payments of loss-carry-forward type and obtains explicit formulas for the exit probabilities. If the lower boundary is understood as the default threshold, then the nondefault probability is solved as a special case. A sufficient and necessary condition for the tax identity is discovered.

Description: In December 1997, the Society of Actuaries held a conference whose focus was actuarial and financial modeling. During the course of that conference, one of the speakers mentioned a number of technologies his firm was using for modeling, which were either unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar to some of the audience. The purpose of this paper is to define each of the technologies mentioned during that presentation and to briefly describe their distinguishing characteristics. The technologies discussed in this paper are statistical pattern recognition [SPR], neural networks [NNs], genetic algorithms [GAs], simulated annealing, fractal analysis, chaos theory, rule induction, data fusion algorithms [DFAs], data compression, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning, and expert systems.

Description: A study of the effect of random interest rates on life insurance programs and on annuities both certain and non-certain. This is done under several assumptions on the stochastic structure of the interest rates.

Description: Research report describing the results of an Emerging Risks Survey conducted in 2012. The report includes comparisons to the four previous surveys as well as a survey sent to INARM members in April 2008.