Description: This paper employs the theory of real option pricing to address problems in the area of operational risk management. Particularly, it develops a two-stage model to help firms determine the optimal triggers in the event of an influenza pandemic. The first stage proposes a regime-dependent epidemic model to simulate the spread of the virus, depending on whether the firm is active or inactive. The second stage views the reactivation decision as a call option and the suspension decision as a put option, and uses dynamic programming method to determine the optimal switching thresholds.

Description: Panelists discuss different aspects of self-selection among Medicare options. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: From a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Diego, CA, June 22-23, 2000 A discussion of liquidity management for life insurance companies marketing institutional clients, in particular with respect to GIC contracts and Funding agreements. Topics included: · What happened at General American with their defaults on funding agreements. Why did the regulators and rating agencies miss the problems? · What was the impact of reinsurance? · What is the effect of adding institutional business such as putable funding agreements on liquidity management? · Are there prudent levels of this business that can be beneficial? · What is the effect of funding agreements with downgrade provisions on liquidity risks, and do such provisions create a preference for sophisticated institutional contract holders?

Description: This presentation from Session 56 of the SOA June 2005 New Orleans Health/Pension Spring Meeting discusses the risks faced by sponsors of defined benefit pension plans and how actuaries can help these plan sponsors adopt plan design strategies to manage these risks. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 31, No. 2.

Description: Presented at May 2005 Spring Meeting. Panelists discuss approaches currently used to measure credit risk exposure within the banking and insurance industries and contrast those approaches with traditional actuarial projection techniques.

Description: Panelists discuss: [1] investment quality as a dynamic investment consideration, [2] the impact of securitization on investment quality, [3] measuring default risk, and [4] the interrelationship between C-1 risk and C-3 risk. From the 1988 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 14, No. 4A.

Description: Mortality risk is the risk that a portfolio will suffer from mortality being heavier than expected. Longevity risk is the risk that a portfolio will suffer from mortality being lighter than expected. From Reinsurance Section News, November 2007, Issue No. 61.

Description: The author discusses and provides an example of how some companies’ enterprise risk management (ERM) programs are designed and implemented in ways that can unwittingly weaken the organization.

Description: Actuaries and other managers of risk identify factors in modeling insurance risks because [i] they feel that these factors may cause the outcome of a risk, or [ii] that the factors can be managed, thus allowing analysts a degree of control over the system risk. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for quantifying the relative importance of a source of risk. The intent is that, with a quantitative measure of relative importance, risk managers will be able to sharpen their intuition about the relative importance of risks and be better custodians of financial security systems. This paper proposes a measure of relative importance that has its roots in both the statistics and economics literatures. The measure is intuitively appealing when assessing the effectiveness of basic risk management techniques including risk exchange, pooling and financial risk management. The risk measure is also shown to be useful in multivariate situations where several factors affect a risk simultaneously. The paper illustrates this usefulness by considering a pool of policies that is subject to mortality, the risk of a disaster that is common to all policies, and to a common investment environment.

Description: Read the August 2018 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.