Description: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: Regularization, by means of trading restrictions, is an effective way to obtain sparse replicating portfolios. By including only the most relevant replicating instruments, the resulting portfolio is more efficient computationally, easier to interpret, and better able to approximate the liability on an out-of-sample basis. The instruments selected depend largely on their respective trading costs. This paper evaluates a number of alternative methods for specifying trading costs. We find that trading costs based on simple statistics of the instrument and liability cash flows are an effective choice in practice. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: The article explores the use of economic capital modeling to deliver value to clients by improving the financial security of many individual lives around the world in a cost-effective way.

Description: Actuaries and rating agencies increasingly believe that the NAIC's formulaic required capital standard does not adequately address a company's insurance, economic market and credit, reporting and pricing risk structure. Economic capital, based upon a stochastic evaluation of a company's total risk exposures, presents a new approach for accurately gauging a company's exposure to risk. Attendees learn what economic capital is, how it is calculated, what it tells company management about risk exposures and how it can serve as a valuable risk-adjusted measurement tool. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 1: Washington D.C. Spring Meeting, May 29–30, 2003, Session 24OF.

Description: A number of insurance companies have recently implemented, or are in the process of implementing, economic risk capital. These programs are being implemented because of concerns with the existing regulatory and accounting frameworks and/or companies' desire to have a capital framework which is more consistent with their risk profile. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 30, No. 2, Spring Meeting, San Antonio, TX, June 14-15, 2004, Session 47PD.

Description: Feature article discussing how insurers have reflected volatility in asset return assumptions when determining capital requirements, but have largely disregarded the impact of mortality volatility on their liability assumptions when performing stochastic analysis.

Description: Panelists discuss economic capital, capital modeling, and hedge modeling, especially for guaranteed living benefits [GLBs] on variable annuities. Session 34PD of the 2005 Valuation Actuary Symposium.

Description: This article discusses the global capital standards for Global Systemically Important Insurers (G-SIIs) and Internationally Active Insurance Groups (IAIGs) currently being developed by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS).

Description: This Specialty Guide is designed to be a source of information for practitioners interested in: learning more about the subject of Economic Capital - definition, uses, tie-in to RBC and calculations - finding out about current market practices in this area, and getting acquainted with available literature on this topic.