Description: This session from the 1993 Valuation Actuary Symposium discusses the growth and deterioration of commercial mortgages and the modeling of commercial mortgages, real estate and CMO's.

Description: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. Panelists provide guidance and suggestions in modeling certain forms of an insurance company's assets, including equity and equity-linked notes, non-dollar investments, real estate, commercial mortgages, and asset pools.

Description: This paper examines the risks involved with equity investing for pension funds. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1959, Vol. 11, No. 31.

Description: This session at the 2003 Valuation Actuary Symposium discusses asset model validation techniques. Applying the results of a cash-flow testing model to other uses is explored. Also, the proliferation of embedded option derivatives, both on the asset and liability side of the balance sheet, both for pricing and for valuation, are discussed.

Description: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. The investment environment has undergone significant change over the last several years through the introduction of many sophisticated investment vehicles. This session provides an update on current challenges encountered by life insurance companies in accounting for this new array of investments. Among the issues covered will be accounting for derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and other hedging vehicles. The session also includes some of the system and projection modeling challenges encountered as a by-product of investment in these vehicles.

Description: Presented at October 1996 Annual Meeting. This panel reviews asset valuation methods in use for retirement plans, pros and cons of each method, how to relate with actuarial assumption and solvency position, tracking with market value, and dealing with new asset categories.

Description: Presented at June 1996 Spring Meeting. Provides overview of modern pricing of assets such as derivatives. It includes theory and practical applications, particularly how they relate to insurance companies.

Description: This presentation estimates several models of interest rates, including seven without and four with regime shifts.

Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting, New York. Insurance regulators commissioned a task force to develop cash-flow variability measurement standards. This session presented the recommendations of that task force and the relationship to cash-flow testing. Topics included: 1. The regulatory need and how the process was approached. 2. The types of CMO variability that the standards attempt to address. 3. A description of the scenario selection process that's used in this model. 4. The prepayment assumptions and the method to be used to collect prepayment data. 5. The relationship to cash-flow testing. 6. The regulators' reactions.

Description: Presentation at the 41st Actuarial Research Conference held on August 10-12, 2006 in Montreal, QC. This paper considers the problem of extending regime-switching models for asset returns to the situation with multiple asset markets. The conditional tail expectation CTE is highly sensitive to the assumed dependence structure between the regime models for the different markets. A Monte Carlo simulation is used to illustrate the cost of misspecification. The authors find that the model most commonly used by practitioners is worse than all of the alternatives that they investigate.