Description: 2011 SOA Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Chicago. This paper reviews a risk management theory that deals with correlated, non-normally distributed factors, and then applies risk management techniques to the U.S. steel industry using futures contract hedging.

Description: This monograph contains papers submitted and presented at the 2013 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium held April 22-24, 2013 in Chicago, Ill. It also includes additional research papers that were submitted and accepted for the 2013 ERM Symposium Call for Papers, but not presented. As in previous years, the goal of the call for papers has been to provide a forum for the very latest in ERM thinking and move forward principle–based research.

Description: A central problem for regulators and risk managers concerns the risk assessment of an aggregate portfolio defined as the sum of d individual dependent risks Xi. This problem is mainly a numerical issue once the joint distribution of (X1,X2, . . . ,Xd) is fully specified. Unfortunately, while the marginal distributions of the risks Xi are often known, their interaction (dependence) is usually either unknown or only partially known, implying that any computed risk measure of the portfolio is subject to model uncertainty. Previous academic research has focused on the maximum and minimum possible values of a given risk measure of the portfolio, in the case in which only the marginal distributions are known. This approach leads to wide bounds, as all information on the dependence is ignored. In this paper, we integrate in a natural way available information on the multivariate dependence and provide easy-to-compute bounds for the risk measure at hand. We observe that incorporating the information of a well-fitted multivariate model may, or may not, lead to much tighter bounds, a feature that also depends on the risk measure used. We illustrate this point by showing that the Value-at-Risk at a very high confidence level (as used in Basel II) is typically prone to very high model risk, even if one knows the multivariate distribution almost completely. Our results make it possible to determine which risk measures can benefit from adding dependence information (i.e., leading to narrower bounds when used to assess portfolio risk), and, hence, to identify those models for which it would be meaningful to develop accurate multivariate models.

Description: The ongoing financial meltdown has cast a shadow over the entire economy, and caused some to question whether the much-hyped movement of enterprise risk management ERM has failed. My answer is, yes, an overarching theme of the credit crisis is a failure of risk management.

Description: A call for essays issued by the SOA Health and Long Term Care Sections on the visions for the future of the U.S. health care system.

Description: This paper discusses a test of whether ERM influences insurers’ stock market performance. Results show that stock market performance is linked to the characteristic of industry events and specific firm characteristics rather than to the success of ERM.

Description: 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Chicago. This is the abstract of the entitled paper.

Description: The underlying premise of this paper is that enterprise risk management (ERM), as it continues to evolve as both a process and a collection of risk management techniques, can benefit from several different (but ultimately somewhat related) “megatrends.” The core of this paper concentrates on the impact on ERM of one of those megatrends: the emergence of a behavioral economics perspective, which is beginning to have a large impact on our understanding of the economy and on certain economic and business processes. The evolution and context of behavioral economics are described, and potential implications for the practice of ERM are discussed. The paper culminates with a variety of specific suggestions for ERM practice in response to findings from behavioral economics research, specifically a number of human cognitive dissonances inconsistent with traditional economic theory.