Description: This article advocates for a lower variable part in salary and increase focus on other mechanisms (goal setting, simpler product, management, culture and processes). The psychological aspect of belonging to the incentive compensation pool is more important that the financial aspect.

Description: This essay advocates for the consideration of risk in an interdisciplinary framework. An "effective resilience" metric is introduced as a way to reflect an organization's exposure and response to an adverse event, and to measure the ability of the organization to mitigate and recover from the resulting reduction in its operating level. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: Response to David Kausch’s comments on the paper.

Description: Companies need to learn to plan for uncertainty by taking into consideration downturns, not just an environment of moderation and occasional booms.

Description: New column centered on enterprise risk management.

Description: This article provides an overview of the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) model act, and of enterprise risk management (ERM). Compared to other actuarial disciplines, health actuaries have not historically focused as much on ERM. But health coverages do have risks that can threaten an insurer's solvency, and ORSA (now in force in most states) will force health insurers to beef up their ERM capabilities.

Description: This paper considers the question of whether the growth in the size of financial statements witnessed over the last several years has yielded an increase in the quality of disclosure around issues of financial risk and to what extent this disclosure is satisfying the perceived needs of readers of the financial statements, as represented by the investment analyst community.

Description: Feature article discussing the IASB’s and FASB’s introduction of the use of other comprehensive income (OCI) to report certain changes in the value of insurance contracts.

Description: Summary of the July, 2013 newsletter with an executive overview of each article.

Description: Target volatility, as an investment strategy, has been used by many funds not only as a way to smooth return but also as a way to manage risks of the VA guarantees. Contrary to existing research which favors volatility targeting over fixed allocation, this article shows that because of the existence of market jump risk, target volatility strategy does not necessarily offer an improved risk profile for VA writers. Further, target volatility coupled with leveraging can significantly increase tail risk for insurance companies.