Description: Slides from a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Diego, CA, June 22-23, 2000 Panelists build on the paper by Luke N. Girard, Market Value of Insurance Liabilities: Reconciling the Actuarial Appraisal and Option-Pricing Methods, that combines, in one framework, the traditional actuarial appraisal method and option-pricing method.

Description: This paper describes the use of the Moses software package to model variable annuities with multiple guarantees. Pricing and risk management are discussed.

Description: Discussion of private letter tax rulings on the definition of Cash Surrender Value for purposes of interpreting the definition of life insurance for the policyholder's taxation of the contracts.

Description: This paper develops a tool that may be useful in explaining the differences between earnings that are reported under GAAP and profits that are expressed as an internal rate of return.

Description: The purpose of this report is to develop information that may be useful to the Pennsylvania legislature in its efforts to regulate the funding of pre-need contracts. What we have done is to develop a theoretical basis for regulation and then to suggest some practical approaches to initial implementation.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to set forth a mathematical technique which in the author's experience has proved useful in testing the tax implications of various management actions.

Description: This work investigates the use of a statistical approach to calculate the incurred but not reported IBNR reserve directly. This allows for the reserve to be estimated in one step, without completion factors, and it provides a confidence interval around the estimate of IBNR as well.

Description: Empirical evidence of reported losses suggests that insurance firms are interconnected in a nontrivial way, making them prone to systemic risk. Systemic risk can be viewed as the result of a cascading process, as it unravels throughout a network structure. In response, this work presents a simple analytical model that can simulate this process. The model is subsequently tested upon an empirical dataset via the means of numerical simulations. This work makes three main contributions. First, it provides a novel methodology for quantitatively and objectively assessing the systemic role of individual firms within the insurance domain. Second, it exemplifies the inability of traditional, firm-based information in serving as proxies for mapping these systemic effects. Third, it provides a practical example where network-based information (e.g., Criticality IDX, Sensitivity IDX) can outperform firm-based information (e.g., admissible assets, excess c apital) resulting in increased efficiency in the decision-making process. These findings strengthen the need to account for the interconnected nature of the domain while showcasing some of the potential benefits that can be harvested by doing so.

Description: This discussion looked at defining tax parity between mutual companies and stock companies as well as the consequences of failure to achieve tax parity.

Description: The panelists from this session at the June 2000 meeting of the Society of Actuaries in San Diego compare and contrast separate account products sold in the U.S. and Canada in both the qualified/registered retirement market and the nonqualified market.