Description: A summary of Modeling Section-sponsored sessions at the 2016 Life/Annuity Symposium, covering model risk management, model governance, and model efficiency.

Description: Article is a detailed discussion of the Risk Management and Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (RMORSA) Model Act that was recently approved by the NAIC and is being adopted by legislatures across the country.

Description: For the purposes of risk management and stress testing, we characterize a spectrum of plausible extreme events, that we dub Grey Swans, by introducing a probabilistic method involving the concentration of measure phenomenon. As a result, stress tests can be triaged according to severity, probability and, now, information-based plausibility.

Description: Recently researchers, practitioners, and regulators had intense debates about how to treat the data collection threshold in operational risk modeling. There are several approaches under consideration—the empirical approach, the “naive” approach, the shifted approach, and the truncated approach—for fitting the loss severity distribution. Since each approach is based on a different set of assumptions, different probability models emerge. Thus, model uncertainty arises. When possible we investigate such model uncertainty analytically, otherwise we use Monte Carlo simulations. For specific parametric examples we consider exponential and Lomax distributions which are special cases of the generalized Pareto family. Our primary goal is to quantify the effect of model uncertainty on risk measurements. This is accomplished by evaluating the probability of each approach producing conservative capital allocations based on the value-at-risk measure. These explorations are further illustrated using a real data set for legal losses in a business unit (Cruz, 2002).

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

Description: Analyzes the need for enterprise risk management for small businesses and the unique principles governing such a discipline. The paper describes a case study done by Goldenson Actuarial Research Center at the University of Connecticut and concludes with some suggestions on how ERM for small businesses can be done on a larger and sustainable scale using student resources supported by large corporations, banks and government organizations.

Description: The ORSA (Own Risk and Solvency Assessment) for ERM frameworks and processes is continuing to be implemented by organizations.

Description: Read the French language version of the December 2016 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: This 2000 word essay won the Joint Management Risk Section 2016 Essay Prize, summarizing the present challenges, potential solutions and Actuarial opportunities.