Description: The article and guidebook of the same name use a stochastic simulation model to examine potential impacts of public pension plan risk-sharing policies on government employers and plan members. Policies examined include simple policies such as COLAs and employee contributions that are contingent upon investment returns or funded ratios, and more-complex policies similar to those used in the Wisconsin Retirement System.

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: Principle-based reserving requires modeling assets and liabilities across a range of scenarios to assess the sufficiency of assets when determining reserves, a major shift from the current formulaic framework. These changes will require valuation actuaries to evolve their skill set by heightening their focus on creative analysis, gaining deeper understanding of complex projections and clearly communicating drivers of reserve movements to stakeholders in order to influence strategic decision-making. The panelists will discuss the way that they see the role of the valuation actuary changing in response to the change in focus in reserving requirements. They will also discuss successful characteristics along with best practices for understanding and explaining results in the new paradigm. The audience will be given the opportunity to interact through polling and facilitated discussion of their stories, experiences and observations.

Description: Many seniors who own houses in the United States have most of their wealth in their houses. Home Equity Conversion Mortgages are designed to allow seniors to borrow money against their house. This paper describes a stochastic simulation approach used to estimate the amount of a level-payment annuity payable as long as the senior is alive and living in his/her home. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1990, VOL. 2.

Description: This paper focuses on two aspects of SFAS 87. The first is the availability of the discount rate, and its consequences. The second is the corridor approach to gains and losses amortization. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, VOL. 2.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, Orlando. In this session the panel consider the question of uncertainty in loss reserves including discussion of sources and measurement. The panelists analyzed the same data set from different perspectives and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches.

Description: This presentation considers the pricing of European derivatives in a Black-Scholes model with stochastic volatility. The presentation shows how Parseval’s theorem may be used to express those prices as Fourier integrals. This is a significant improvement over Monte Carlo simulation in many cases. The main ingredient in this presentation's method is the Laplace transform of the ordinary [constant volatility] price of a put or call in the Black-Scholes model, where the transform is taken with respect to maturity [T]. The presentation derives these formulas and then applies them to the case where volatility is modelled as a Markov chain in continuous time, the so-called 'Markov regime switching model'. This model has been used previously in stochastic volatility modelling, but mostly with only N=2 states. The presentation shows how to use N=3 states without difficulty, and how larger number of states can be handled. Numerical illustrations are given, including the volatility smile in a three-state model.

Description: With this paper, a new theory of immunization is introduced in which the approach is multivariate, and the goal is stochastic in the sense of minimizing stochastic risk. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: This is an Excel 2003 spreadsheet that accompanies the research report entitled 'The Effect of Deflation or High Inflation on the Insurance Industry.' It models scholastically the effects of inflation and deflation.