Description: With the possible exception of full faith and credit debts of the United States, every loan carries some risk with it regardless of the borrower, and this risk varies depending on the creditworthiness of the person or institution that is supposed to repay the debt. Bearing that risk requires some sort of capital, both as a legal requirement and as evidence of good sense in lending, but recently we seem to have forgotten the basic relationship between a loan and the capital associated with it. The lesson of the current debacle is, or certainly ought to be, that the risk inherent in a financial transaction cannot be made to go away by the mere act of repackaging that transaction and renaming it.

Description: Note developed by the IAA for insurers to support the ERM Standards and Guidance materials developed by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors for supervisors.

Description: From a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Diego, CA, June 22-23, 2000 Company representatives and state insurance department representatives addressed issues faced by companies in complying with the form-filing process. In addition, they offered suggestions and guidance in expediting policy form approvals.

Description: 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Chicago. This paper explores cognitive and behavioral theories that can be applied to explain why emerging risk is often overlooked, downplayed or ignored. It also proposes an innovative framework for managing emerging risk within an overall enterprise risk management program.

Description: The interactive visuals provided a compelling demonstration for Allstate's leadership team to see the effects of changes to Allstate's risk profile.

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: Provides the results of two surveys that found actuaries to be in agreement with CEOs of life insurance companies on the top 2 key strategic issues facing the industry: distribution channel productivity and increased competition.

Description: Risk management theory prescribes a few legitimate reasons for management to hedge corporate revenues and reduce income volatility. In this paper we will use the oil tanker industry to illustrate some of these strategic considerations and how management can account for them in their decisions regarding whether and how much to hedge. Further work is needed to incorporate these considerations into a broader theoretical framework. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

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: 2011 ERM Symposium, Chicago. This is the abstract of the entitled paper.