Description: This is the full research report for the thirteenth Emerging Risk Survey which summarizes the results of the survey.

Description: This is Table 2 from a March 2011 presentation at the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium entitled Capital Allocation in the Property-Liability Insurance Industry.

Description: 2011 SOA Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Chicago. This is the abstract of the referenced paper.

Description: Since 2008 the Joint Risk Management Section, sponsored in partnership by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA), Society of Actuaries (SOA) and Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), has annually conducted a Survey of Emerging Risks. As the researcher for this project, I have asked open-ended questions thought to be useful to risk managers. Andy Grove noted the importance of viewing problems from an outsider’s perspective. After a strategy he implemented had struggled, he hypothesized how the strategy would change if he was fired. This paper summarizes activities that are perceived as adding value by risk managers. Each company is unique based on the skill set of the risk team and needs of the firm, many of which are strategic and can be fulfilled through well thought out scenario testing. These can be split into eight themes.

Description: The Chinese insurance market is grappling with product innovation, business growth and regulatory oversight as it tries to keep pace with a sharp growth in demand across product segments. In this context, the authors have highlighted insurance trends in China, based on available research and literature, with a particular focus on topics that will drive the enterprise risk management (ERM) function of insurance companies. ERM provides an opportunity for insurers to identify and mitigate potential insurance risks by enhancing their policies and risk management activities. This report explores the insurance trends in detail, drawing on findings from interviews of practitioners in the Chinese market, to provide context for the drivers of ERM transformation.

Description: A primer on extreme event modeling and mitigation for practitioners, it covers the complete cycle of extreme event risk management, from identifying experience data sources, to extreme event detection, to modeling and dependence analysis, and finally to monitoring and mitigation.

Description: Political figures and journalists have tended to blame deregulation and greed for the credit crisis. However, we would like to suggest that these were not the primary cause of the credit crisis. The real cause of the crisis was faulty regulation and arrogance. Flawed regulation in the over-reliance on complicated capital models and arrogance in believing that the complex mathematical formula in risk models overcame the limitations on input availability and enabled companies to capture returns that were greater than the cost of capital, have led Wall Street by creating CDOs and similar instruments to repackage risks and take out the systematic excess risk charges as profits, and have also allowed companies to run “prudently” on leverage ratios that were in hindsight over the limit.

Description: The problem facing risk distributors is that product pricing is sticky, whereas the market price of risk can be quite volatile. This disconnection can become particularly severe during market downturns. The problem facing risk insurers is maintaining market share in benign market conditions when the market price of risk is low. Strategies that are dynamic with respect to time are difficult in practice, since they require more capital in volatile markets.

Description: Feature article discussing quantitative impact studies, QIS5, on Solvency II.

Description: Much of enterprise risk management has its roots in portfolio management and corporate finance. The concepts of trading off risk and return and benefits of diversification are well understood and articulated in both the actuarial and economics fields, so I don’t believe there are significant knowledge gaps preventing actuaries from contributing to the field. In fact, actuaries may have an advantage in many situations where a large part of a firm’s overall risk arises from pension activities or other more typical actuarial risks.