Description: Are Your Scenarios on Target?From Risks and Rewards Newsletter, August 2005, Issue No. 47. Actuaries are faced with the dilemma of how to incorporate advances in insurance products and modeling technology into their work. Increasingly, this means looking at a large number of potential outcomes using stochastic simulations.

Description: This article provides an overview of the different types of real world interest rate scenarios that practitioners use in the life insurance industry and explores different approaches to building those generators.

Description: This paper first derives the fair participation rate based on a fair value of the equity-indexed annuity EIA. Then using risk measures, a new participation rate is obtained, based on the tail loading of the hedging error distribution. Risk management strategies reducing risk related to the hedging error are also presented. A detailed numerical analysis is performed for a point-to-point EIA.

Description: Reviews book entitled Stochastic Theory of a Risk Business by Hilary Seal. Book presents a comprehensive survey of the literature on the mathematical foundations of risk taking as a business.

Description: Continuation of article from previous issue. This article illustrates the practical and financial implications of applying nested stochastic techniques to a sample product.

Description: This article is based on an excerpt from a Milliman Research Report on universal life insurance with secondary guarantees, ULSG. It discusses stochastic profit analysis and the impact of investment volatility of two common variants of ULSGs - level specified premium and single-fund shadow account designs.

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.

Description: The article discusses that drawbacks of the HJM Heath-Jarrow-Morton class of stochastic interest models and suggests the use of the Longstaff-Schwartz string model. It describes the use and benefits of the Lonstaff-Schwartz string model.

Description: This teaching session is about conveying to users of models and forecasts how uncertain the outcome of stochastic projections really is.

Description: Modeling experience sharing by David Yu who leads the retirement product and asset model development team within Prudential Financial