Description: This paper, originally published in 1992 in the Transactions of Society of Actuaries Vol. 44, deals with a topic that is becoming increasingly important to actuaries in most fields of practice. “Without relying on formulas, this paper presents the important concepts underlying the theory of arbitrage-free pricing of interest-rate-contingent cash flows.” This paper, by James A. Tilley, won the 1992-93 Annual Prize, and the Halmstad Prize for 1992. The paper includes written discussion and the author’s review of the discussions.

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This paper proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.

Description: The intent of this paper is the analysis of the influence of risk that took place during winter and summer 2006 on economic results of utilities selling power to final customers. Efficient risk management requires the restructuring of the approach to company management. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

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: Mortality trend risk affects pension plans, life insurers, annuity writers and insurers of workers’ compensation, where the tail claims are mostly annuities. As with many risk sources, mortality risk can be broken down into process risk, parameter risk and model risk. In this paper, process risk, parameter risk and model risk are discussed using the fitted models. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: This is a discussion about how actuaries have become more and more involved in work outside what may be considered traditional actuarial functions. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1969, Vol. 21 Pt. 2, No. 59.

Description: This paper takes the position that a retirement plan should not be evaluated differently than other financial arrangements, and, therefore, its value should be measured through a utility function. The paper then suggests a method of incorporating utility theory into the retirement plan design model. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

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 paper examines concepts from both financial economic and actuarial science as applied to defined benefit schemes using a simple discounted cash-flow framework as a reference point. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

Description: This is a concluding and encompassing part of our research on the project entitled \Weighted Premium Calculation Principles and Risk Capital Allocations, which has been supported by the Actuarial Education and Research Fund AERF and the Society of Actuaries Committee on Knowledge Extension Research CKER. We explore the concept of weighted distributions and their role in various phenomena occurring in insurance and finance. In particular, we relate weighted distributions to actuarial and economic premium calculation principles, and also to the capital asset pricing model CAPM. Imitating the latter, we propose a weighted insurance pricing model WIPM. Although general in formulation, we show that the WIPM can successfully be evaluated in a variety of situations, which we illustrate with a number of examples.