Description: A paper entitled “A Regime-Switching Model of Long-Term Stock Returns” appears in the April 2001 issue of the North American Actuarial Journal. In it, Dr. Mary Hardy describes a model for future equity returns and some reasons why that model might better reflect real equity price movements than the often-used lognormal model. The purpose of this article is to apply a two-regime model to variable annnuity GMDB pricing and compare the results to those from a lognormal model.

Description: This paper discusses some of the models used to quantify risk, note some areas where improvements in standard methods are needed, and in some cases suggest alternative approaches for risks in Property and Casualty Insurance and Life Insurance.

Description: In computing actuarial measurements, such as the moments of present value functions for insurance and annuities, the stochastic nature of the interest rate is commonly ignored. This paper treats the interest rate as a normal random variable and presents general formulas for the mean and variance of the present value function for insurance and annuities. An example demonstrating these formulas is presented. It is found that taking the force of interest to be fixed at a mean value results in slightly underestimating the actuarial present value along with the variance for both insurance and annuities.

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 paper shows how the results of copula based capital aggregation models can always be locally approximated by relatively simple formulas. The paper defines the concepts of diversification factor and tail correlation matrix and describes methods for estimating these quantities from simulated data. We show how these ideas can be put into practice as both computational shortcuts and presentation tools.

Description: More Efficient Monte Carlo Simulations for Mortality Assumption Testing

Description: This article looks at stochastic techniques actuaries can use to quantify the non-market risks in insurance products and how stochastic techniques can be used in the evaluation of reinsurance arrangements.

Description: This paper proposes the use of stochastic compartment model methods for estimating both the current direct and current indirect costs of specific cancers and for forecasting future direct and indirect costs. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1982, Vol. 34.

Description: An overview of guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits (GLWB) on registered index-linkedannuity (RILA) products and a stochastic analysis of market risks.

Description: Following Jorgensen and Paes De Souza 1994, Tweedie's compound Poisson distribution is fitted to private passenger automobile accident benefit data. The Tweedie process is a three parameter distribution which corresponds to a Poisson process for claim frequency with gamma distributed claim sizes. From Actuarial Research Conference 1995.