Description: In reaction to a spate of model conversion activity and rising acceptance of model risk management techniques, many companies have, or are in the process of centralizing their modeling function to accommodate both governance and efficiency demands. These operating model changes have produced a wide range of questions and issues, such as division of labor, roles and responsibilities, selection of tasks to keep decentralized, among others. This session will frame a series of key considerations around modeling function consideration, and share lessons learned with the audience.

Description: Presented at May 2005 Spring Meeting. Panelists discuss the process of setting long-term investment assumptions from a practical perspective, including changes in equity return premium, use of risk-neutral scenarios and methodology, and special considerations for setting pricing scenarios.

Description: This session from the 1994 Valuation Actuary Symposium focuses on the modeling of assets and the problems and solutions for calculating asset market values in asset/liability models. It also covers considerations in using deterministic versus stochastic yield curve scenarios and modeling issues in developing investment strategies.

Description: This provides a basic example of a mathematical model which may be used to build an investment portfolio which will minimize the risk of interest rate fluctuations.

Description: 1998 SOA Spring Meeting, Maui. The panelists discussed the many factors involved with insurance company decisions on whether they are putting their money to work in a most prudent fashion. This session focused on the practical aspects of asset allocation.

Description: This paper studies the internal rate of return of a finite series of cash flows in terms of three natural axioms. Examples of rate of return functions are constructed and their economic significance is discussed. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1992 Vol. 1.

Description: Provides a how-to session on modeling assets and liabilities in the Valuation Actuary's work to comply with the Standard Valuation Law. Comparisons of the methods discussed are occasionally made with the requirements of New York Regulation 126. Session 12 of the 1991 Valuation Actuary Symposium.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. This session discusses the purposes of building an asset model, the resource requirements, model validation, model granularity, understanding spreads, and model interest rates.

Description: This research paper examines the justification of using the one-factor general equilibrium model of Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross to model the term structure of interest rates and their volatility. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1990 Vol. 1.

Description: This article pertains to the optimal asset allocation of surplus from an insurance company model. The insurance company is represented by a compound Poisson risk process which is perturbed by diffusion and has investments. The investments are in both risky and risk-free types of assets similar to stocks/real estate and bonds. The insurance company can borrow at a constant interest rate in the event of a negative surplus. Numerical analysis appears to show that an optimal asset allocation range can be estimated for certain parameters and compared with insurance data. Using a conservative method to minimize the probability of ruin, a reasonable optimal asset allocation range for a typical insurance company is about 4.5 to 8.2 percent invested in risky stock/real estate assets. An inequality and the exact solution are obtained for the pure diffusion equation. In addition, the asymptotic form of the ruin probability is shown to be a power function.