Description: A presentation at the Actuarial Research Conference in August 2006 in Montreal. This paper discusses the Basel VaR Value at Risk test of a bank's VaR model. It proposes an alternative, Quality Control of Risk Measures QCRM Hypothesis test. The alternative is more likely to reject an incorrect VaR model.

Description: The initial risk reserves in collective risk models vary according to the underlying claim distribution, and a suitable level of ruin probability. A thorough analysis of the needed initial surplus for various ruin probability levels is provided in eight meaningful examples. The claim distributions are drawn from various fields of insurance, including property damage and liability insurance.

Description: This paper cautions against using expected utility theory for measuring insurance risk, because of the numerous inherent difficulties associated with it. Instead, an approach for loading gross premiums that is based on risk-measure functions is explored. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: Metadata for entire issue

Description: This paper introduces a rich stochastic modeling framework for understanding risks in multiple-decrement contracts. The example in the paper is a 20-year Term insurance contract. Not only are mortality and lapsation considered stochastic, but the parameters governing them are. For example, mortality risk is composed of four risk elements, including error generated in the underwriting process, volatility around the best estimate, catastrophic events that impact mortality, and the trend in mortality improvement or deterioration. When stochastically modeled, the relative contribution and risk profile of each risk element can be evaluated. Generating stochastic mortality results provides a distribution of results that an organization faces and the severity and incidence of the tail events.

Description: This article advocates for a lower variable part in salary and increase focus on other mechanisms (goal setting, simpler product, management, culture and processes). The psychological aspect of belonging to the incentive compensation pool is more important that the financial aspect.

Description: The intent of this paper is the analysis of the influence of risk that took place during winter and summer 2006 on economic results of utilities selling power to final customers. Efficient risk management requires the restructuring of the approach to company management. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

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: The U.K. Pension Protection Fund (PPF) was established in April 2005 to protect the pensions of members of U.K. private sector defined benefit pension schemes that have insufficient assets and whose corporate sponsor fails. The Fund takes over the pension scheme assets and assumes responsibility for the payment of compensation to the former members of the scheme. The PPF is funded by a levy on the population of eligible schemes. To improve its ERM framework, the PPF has undertaken a reverse stress testing exercise. This analysis provided the organization with new insights into its risk profile, the scenarios leading to the PPF’s potential “failure,” and interactions between these scenarios. This paper discusses the principles and objectives of reverse stress testing in the special case of the PPF and then illustrates the application of complex system science techniques for the purpose of reverse stress testing.

Description: This article highlights some of OSFI’s expectations regarding the ORSA process, and provides general feedback and observations from OSFI’s reading of 2014 ORSA reports (including KMR) and discussions with insurers.