Description: The purpose of this report is to develop information that may be useful to the Pennsylvania legislature in its efforts to regulate the funding of pre-need contracts. What we have done is to develop a theoretical basis for regulation and then to suggest some practical approaches to initial implementation.

Description: The paper o ers a simple framework for ranking the common reinsurance struc- tures in practice with the theory of stochastic orders. The basic idea is to slice the space of reinsurance structures into groups by expected loss cost to facilitate the comparisons within the group and between groups. Given the standard risk aversion assumption in economics, a spectrum of reinsurance structures with the same expected loss cost can be compared analytically with one another and sequenced based on their risk coverages under the convex order. The paper then expands the dimension of the comparison to groups of reinsurance structures with di erent expected loss costs, which can be ranked under the increasing convex order and the usual stochastic order. As such, the paper maps out the ordering for the entire space of reinsurance structures and presents it in a ma- trix format for quick reference. The implication

Description: Thailand has been experiencing a high and rapid HIV infection growth rate due to a combination of exotic new strains of the HIV, heavy intravenous drug use, a flourishing commercial sex industry and entrenched high-risk behavior by Thai males. Although major uncertainties remain about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Thailand, one thing is certain: HIV infection will continue to spread. Therefore Thai life insurance companies have to make plans for coping with the consequences of this epidemic.

Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: Part one of a two-part article, to be contined in Feb 2014. Provides useful rules of thumb for breaking out investment return into components of periodic arithmetic return, geometric return, the volatility of returns and the correlation of returns by asset class. Develops and relates these axiomatic concepts into rules of thumb for estimating quantiles of a range of stochastic returns.

Description: Under non-Aristotelian logic, there are multiple values, or shades of gray. Indeed, there may even be unexpected results from logical combinations, like “both” and “neither.” This article discusses how this insight should be applied to the current debate between formula-driven reserves with limited assumption flexibility and the reserve principles approach. For reserve standards, we do need both actuarial judgment grounded in reserving principles and restrictive formula methods or safe harbors.

Description: Risk management and capital budgeting are two critical components of the corporate decision process. They often need to be considered jointly at the corporate level because of their natural interaction through the dependent risk exposures and other synergetic relationships within an intricate corporate structure in a dynamic business environment. . This paper develops an integrated framework that aligns these two important corporate strategies across business divisions to optimize the streamlined enterprise strategic goal in a multi-period setting. The proposed integrated framework can serve as a practical guideline for corporate executives to optimally coordinate capital budgeting and risk management at the enterprise level.

Description: In addition to death and maturity guarantees on the mutual funds they sell, some insurance companies make it possible for the investor to extend the guarantees for a fixed number of years. In this paper, we consider the case when that option is of the European type that is, the investor, at maturity, can either close out the contract or extend it for the stated, fixed term. When extended, the guarantee is on the value of the fund at the original maturity date. The fund is assumed to be fully invested in common stock.

Description: This article analyzes the events leading to low interest rates and recommends careful asset/liability management and risk analysis to address future challenges with interest rates.

Description: This article deals with enterprise risk management and how the techniques contained within the discipline can help prevent unforeseen large mistakes in strategy, product design, and product management