Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting, New York. This session discussion is about asset prepayment assumptions for regulatory cash-flow testing. Topics included: 1. The prepayment characteristics of corporate bonds with embedded options. 2. How much prepayment and redemption activity has taken place within that market. 3. Techniques that corporate bond issuers have used to retire debt prior to maturity. 4. The investment implications. 5. The impact that prepayments have on MBS price and return performance. 6. The challenges of prepayment modeling.

Description: Overview of Investment Section activity and vision ahead.

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.

Description: This article presents recent developments and trends with respect to Economic Capital based on the work of the EC subgroup of the SOA's Risk Management Task Force.

Description: This paper examines the theory of surplus for a mutual life insurance organization. The paper tries to answer several important questions - What exactly is surplus, what is its purpose, of what magnitude might it be, from whence does it arise, and what are its implications with respect to equity between policyholders.

Description: The CAS is pleased to present its Research Paper, “Users’ Guide to Economic Scenario Generation in Property-Casualty Insurance”. Although there are cases in the literature about the use of economic scenario generators (ESGs) in the property casualty industry, they are far more commonly used for life insurance companies. Our hope is that this paper will serve as a comprehensive guide to the implementation of ESGs in the non-life space and spark interest in research into new applications of ESGs.

Description: This article provides guidelines for practitioners of risk management. These guidelines fall under four general headings: 1. Understanding and fulfilling your role in the organization. 2. General risk management. 3. The use of derivatives. 4. Risk measurement systems.

Description: This paper defines a concept of equivalence for profit standards. The central principle advanced is that the company should set prices on all its products to produce marginal profits that are equal in proportion to the products' marginal use of surplus. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1981, Vol. 33.

Description: This report aims to help actuaries and other interested parties to define the relative differences in managing risks between the insurance and banking industries. This report guides actuaries and others about change risk management practices to prevent future financial failures. The paper seeks to examine what factors account for the differences in the United States, compared with Canada about the underlying causes and effects of the most recent crisis with financial institutions.