Description: Increased attention was paid to regulatory capital with the global financial crisis in 2008. Whilst companies may not have the incentives to retain a large amount of capital in the absence of regulatory capital requirements, overcapitalized entities can have drawback such as its impact on competitiveness. There are other weaknesses in the regulatory capital model such as its limitation in facilitating risk-based decisions as regulatory capital does not necessarily reflect the economic reality and risks an entity faces. Nonetheless, there are ways for regulators and/or companies to handle the weaknesses in the regulatory capital model. For instance, granularity can be introduced in determining regulatory capital. Economic capital can be used to encourage entities to implement risk management controls and facilitate risk-based business decisions (e.g., risk-adjusted performance assessment and risk-based capital allocation). Ultimately, hav ing effective risk management and risk-based capital determination are ways to prevent company failures and bankruptcies.

Description: Economic capital is an embedded part of the banking risk management and regulatory framework. The insurance industry has relied on rating agency and regulatory formulas that have been criticized as overcapitalizing and not appropriately differentiating risk drivers in the capital formulation. The emergence of C-3 Phase I and C-3 Phase II have introduced an economic approach to capital in the insurance industry. This half-day seminar takes a detailed look at the subject of economic capital. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries 2005, Volume 31, No. 1: 2005 New Orleans Life Spring Meeting, May 22-24, 2005, Session 9 Seminar.

Description: This article discusses a good way for insurance companies to calibrate economic capital (tail risk level) that is consistent with the market opinion on its risk. It also establishes a bridge between a risk neutral evaluation and a real world evaluation.

Description: The articles discusses how Principles-based approaches PBA to setting reserves and capital can be combined with Enterprise Risk Management to create a competitive advantage for an insurance company. Those companies can leverage these models by combining unique risks and strategies to measure and manage risk.

Description: This paper provides a novel approach to the valuation of the market value of economic surplus that is stable and immune from “market noise”.

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: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They 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, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: Actuaries and rating agencies increasingly believe that the NAIC's formulaic required capital standard does not adequately address a company's insurance, economic market and credit, reporting and pricing risk structure. Economic capital, based upon a stochastic evaluation of a company's total risk exposures, presents a new approach for accurately gauging a company's exposure to risk. Attendees learn what economic capital is, how it is calculated, what it tells company management about risk exposures and how it can serve as a valuable risk-adjusted measurement tool. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 1: Washington D.C. Spring Meeting, May 29–30, 2003, Session 24OF.

Description: Regularization, by means of trading restrictions, is an effective way to obtain sparse replicating portfolios. By including only the most relevant replicating instruments, the resulting portfolio is more efficient computationally, easier to interpret, and better able to approximate the liability on an out-of-sample basis. The instruments selected depend largely on their respective trading costs. This paper evaluates a number of alternative methods for specifying trading costs. We find that trading costs based on simple statistics of the instrument and liability cash flows are an effective choice in practice. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: This article discusses the global capital standards for Global Systemically Important Insurers (G-SIIs) and Internationally Active Insurance Groups (IAIGs) currently being developed by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS).