Description: This presentation is a Teaching Session, number 30TS, from the 2002 Valuation Actuary Symposium, held September 19-20 in Lake Buena Vista, FL. The panelists discuss modeling issues for products with embedded options, such as minimum living or death benefit guarantees on variable life and annuities, and annuity death benefit enhancements. They discuss the risks posed by these features and products, selecting realistic dynamic assumptions, techniques used in modeling these features and products, stochastic analysis, and presenting results to best communicate risks clearly. Discussion from participants is included.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to survey some new results concerning the term structure of interest rates and discuss actuarial applications. The term structure of interest rates exhibits the relationship among the yields on default free debt instruments of different maturities. Although there is a considerable volume of literature dealing with the determinants of the term structure the analysis has until recently been presented for the most part in a deterministic i.e. non- stochastic framework. This constrasts with the treatment of capital assets where equilibrium prices have been obtained under the assumption that returns on these assets are random variables.

Description: This article deals with enterprise risk management and how the techniques contained within the discipline can help prevent unforeseen large mistakes in strategy, product design, and product management

Description: A discussion of methods used to determine the liability of segregated fund or separate account investment guarantees.

Description: In this note, the asymptotic behavior of the probability of ruin is derived by means of infinitesimal generators and Laplace transforms. Using these same tools, it is shown that the probability of ruin has an algebraic decay rate if the insurance company invests its capital in a risky asset with a price which follows a geometric Brownian motion. The latter result is shown to be valid not only for exponentially distributed claim amounts, as in Frolova et al. 2002, but, more generally, for any claim amount distribution that has a moment generating function defined in a neighborhood of the origin.

Description: In 2003, the American Academy of Actuaries Life Capital Adequacy Subcommittee LCAS published a set of 10,000 stochastic scenarios that was intended to be used to support the publication, “Recommended Approach for Setting Regulatory Risk-Based Capital Requirements for Variable Products with Guarantees Excluding Index Guarantees.” The primary purpose of this article is to illustrate statistical measures that can be used to evaluate stochastic simulations.

Description: Two breakout sessions were held. Their goal was to explore ways in which researchers and practitioners could be brought closer together. The following summaries were edited by Stuart Klugman from notes taken by the indicated participants: Session #1 - Bridging the gap with regard to modality and morbidity and Session #2 - Bridging the gap with regard to financial modeling.

Description: This is authors' Fellowship Credit Research Paper. This paper will develop a model for cash flow testing traditional participating insurance that utilizes pricing tools and assumptions to project reserve liabilities. The model makes use of finance and accounting tools to monitor the reasonableness of ending and intermediate surplus results that emerge under the various interest rate scenarios imposed.

Description: During the last decade, a vast activity had been observed in generalizing of the classical discrete distributions. The main idea was to apply the extended versions fur modeling different kinds of dependent count or frequency data structure in various fields. In the present paper we suggest extensions of the classical univariate geometric, negative binomial, Poisson, Bernoulli, binomial and logarithmic series distributions, by including an additional parameter. It has a natural interpretation in terms of zero-inflation, and because of this we named the corresponding generalized versions adding inflated-parameter.

Description: This paper builds a new risk model for a firm which is sensitive to its credit quality. A modified Jarrow, Lando and Turnball model [Markov Chain model] is used to model the credit rating. Recursive equations for finite time ruin probability and distribution of ruin time are derived. Coupled Volterra type integral equation systems for ultimate ruin probability, severity of ruin and joint distribution of surplus before and after ruin are also obtained. Some numerical results are included.