Description: This paper illustrates a current approach to capital allocation, referred to herein as Tail Contribution Analysis TCA, using it to evaluate the impact of changes in an insurer’s operations by allocating capital to individual lines of business. It then highlights a common problem in the implementation of the procedure arising from reserve volatility and briefly notes the failure of the methodology to account for a firm’s changing levels of risk under various strategies. Finally, it introduces an alternative method for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. We will discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, we will illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: This paper introduces a rich stochastic modeling framework for understanding risks in multiple-decrement contracts. The example in the paper is a 20-year Term insurance contract. Not only are mortality and lapsation considered stochastic, but the parameters governing them are. For example, mortality risk is composed of four risk elements, including error generated in the underwriting process, volatility around the best estimate, catastrophic events that impact mortality, and the trend in mortality improvement or deterioration. When stochastically modeled, the relative contribution and risk profile of each risk element can be evaluated. Generating stochastic mortality results provides a distribution of results that an organization faces and the severity and incidence of the tail events.

Description: This article discusses scenario generators to price or value insurance products.

Description: From a session at the Spring meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Antonio, Texas, June 14-15, 2004 This session covers different methods for estimating future volatility of financial markets, how to predict the effect of volatility on insurance company results, alternative approaches to managing volatility and the impact on volatility management on the choice of modeling method.

Description: Read the December 2016 issue of The Modeling Platform published by the Modeling Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: This article deals with enterprise risk management and how the techniques contained within the discipline can help prevent unforeseen large mistakes in strategy, product design, and product management

Description: Article AERF in The Actuary, May 1979, Volume 13, Number 5

Description: The purpose of this paper is to explore pension plan dynamics— – the behavior of a defined- benefit pension plan over time in an uncertain environment. We proceed by simulating the behavior of a model plan in a stochastically varying economic environment. While both the model and its environment are simplified, the model displays interesting behavior suggesting policy considerations that should be included in the design and funding of these plans.

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.

Description: This paper uses contingent claims analysis to evaluate portfolios of vulnerable private loan guarantees and investigate their risk diversification properties.