Description: Statistics were invented to describe heterogeneity and are now applied to tackle alea. It may not be appropriate. Let's clarify their field of relevance.

Description: This article describes how we can choose to accept our setbacks in life and in our careers, or challenge ourselves to push through them.

Description: In the process of getting credentialed, there are more important things than a passing score. Life is not about numbers but transferable behaviors.

Description: The author encourages the use of sound actuarial principles to develop reasonable retirement spending budgets instead of rule of thumb approaches commonly used.

Description: Read the French language version of the March 2017 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Other articles that will be of interest to readers.

Description: Hear from the editor’s on the March 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the JRMS.

Description: This article provides a detailed description of the unbalanced subsidy provisions in the Affordable Care Act with easy to follow numerical illustrations. An understanding of the illustrative calculations is necessary to understand the subsidy implications. The article highlights some surprising and likely unintended results that will be interest to issuers, employers, consumers, regulators and policymakers. Actuaries can add expertise to their clients and to the public discussion with a proper understanding of the subsidy calculations and the resulting implications.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: This article discusses incentive compensation metrics set to motivate performance, retain people, satisfy legal constraints and Say-on-pay and promote good risk management. Alignment discussion between actual metrics characteristics and the behavior they promote.