Description: The research investigates the challenges associated with determining a “fair value” assessment for embedded options in two product types and incorporates the process into product pricing and liability valuation

Description: This report is sponsored by the Society of Actuaries in collaboration with Ernst & Young. It examines the application of stochastic modeling techniques to non-market risks facing the life insurance industry.

Description: 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium. The panelists discussed how asset liability management is synonymous with a dynamic financial analysis and quantitative risk management. Topics covered were systems implementations including asset risk exposure optimization given a company-specific set of liabilities and total risk exposure optimization, which includes stochastic analysis of alternative asset and liability strategies.

Description: Read the November 2019 issue of The Modeling Platform, published by the Modeling Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: This paper presents some preliminary results of an analysis of data from a regional municipality in Ontario to assess long term care risks. The data includes information on the optimal level of care at one or more points in time for each individual under study modelled using a Markov process.

Description: Annual reports of the U.S. Social Security Trustees present 75-year financial projections of the system under three different deterministic sets of economic and demographic assumptions or scenarios. The extent of the divergence between these scenarios provides useful information concerning the range of possible outcomes, but, in the absence of stochastic model projections, no probability measure can be assigned to the three scenarios, apart from being described as intermediate, low-cost and high-cost. Demographic research and stochastic model forecasts of U.S. population suggest plausible hypotheses for analysis of the divergence characteristics of the actuarial solvency ratios implied by the three deterministic scenarios. Available data from the 2002 Trustees’ report are presented and various statistical measures are developed to aid in the assessment of plausible associated probability measures for the scenario projections.

Description: Read the April 2020 issue of The Modeling Platform, published by the Modeling Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Prior work indicates that a regime-switching stochastic model with randomized regime parameters creates a more plausible set of extreme paths than do the usual stochastic interest rate models. Generalizing the Black-Karasinski model by randomizing the mean reversion target provides an example. Better to understand such models, as well as to calibrate their parameters without trial and error runs of a stochastic model, this paper uses an asymptotic expansion to estimate the moments of the integrated stochastic process over time. Mention is made of a family of related asymptotic expansions that could be of wider interest.

Description: Principle-based reserving requires modeling assets and liabilities across a range of scenarios to assess the sufficiency of assets when determining reserves, a major shift from the current formulaic framework. These changes will require valuation actuaries to evolve their skill set by heightening their focus on creative analysis, gaining deeper understanding of complex projections and clearly communicating drivers of reserve movements to stakeholders in order to influence strategic decision-making. The panelists will discuss the way that they see the role of the valuation actuary changing in response to the change in focus in reserving requirements. They will also discuss successful characteristics along with best practices for understanding and explaining results in the new paradigm. The audience will be given the opportunity to interact through polling and facilitated discussion of their stories, experiences and observations.

Description: A classical risk model with a multi-layer premium rate is considered in this paper. In the two-layer case, an explicit expression is obtained for the joint distribution of the maximal surplus up to ruin, the surplus immediately before ruin and the deficit at ruin. Such an expression involves some known results on the joint distribution at ruin for a risk model with a constant premium rate. In the multi-layer case, a scheme is proposed to compute its ruin probability.