Description: 2011 SOA ERM Symposium, Chicago. This paper addresses the contradiction between the financial theory of hedging and management practice. It also examines how consistent hedging policy is incompatible with management’s competencies and role in the company, requiring management to form strong future price expectations. Finally, this paper describes a process that management actually follows when making decisions about hedging and stress the role of the expectations discrepancy in this process.

Description: The sale process is a team effort. On the sell side, the team usually consists of the seller, their investment banker, the external actuaries and a legal team. On the buy side, the team consists of accounting and tax experts in addition to the previous disciplines. For a sale to be successful, the team on each side must be able to communicate the story of the company in a consistent, focused manner to their publics. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: Title Page/Copyright. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: In developing the economic assumptions for use in an appraisal, a team approach must be used. The investment bankers, external actuaries, and the company's financial area research current and historic economic conditions to develop an internally consistent base scenario. To be successful all parties must be comfortable with this scenario and its implications on production, investment yields, and, ultimately, distributable earnings. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: One of the primary goals of the actuarial appraisal is to provide enough information for potential investors to make informed judgments as to the potential value of a property. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: This paper focuses on business risks rather than market, credit and operational risks. The author proposes a bottom-up approach for modelling and measuring business risk where the dynamic of the underlying earnings is described in a continuous-time model.

Description: This paper was intended to give a broad overview of the international M&A process and the role of the actuary in it. There is, however, no cookbook approach, as the dynamics of each transaction are unique. It is important for buyers and sellers alike to get the best advice possible to conclude a successful transaction. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: This paper describes methods for determining bounds on the price of derivative instruments, such as option on insurance futures, given only market information. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to help practitioners and regulators more accurately quantify the potential impact of market risk on insurance products with equity-linked guarantees. To this end, this paper examines time series model selection and assessment based on residuals, with a focus on regime switching models. Also it discusses the difficulties in defining residuals for such processes and propose several possible alternatives. We determine that a stochastic approach to defining the residuals is the only way to generate residuals that are normally distributed under the model hypothesis.