Description: Discussant comments for the 2009 Housing Wealth monograph paper, “Home Equity and At-Need Annuities—A Dynamic Long-Term Care Funding Duo”. The author finds that the ideas discussed in this paper should stimulate more thinking about financial products and public sector programs and how they can better serve older homeowners.

Description: This paper describes the prevalence of the still uninsured long-term care financial risk, and how the at-need annuity/home equity combination can address long term care needs.

Description: Author’s response to discussant comments for the 2009 Housing Wealth monograph paper, “Home Equity and At-Need Annuities—A Dynamic Long-Term Care Funding Duo”. The paper describes the prevalence of the still uninsured long-term care financial risk, and how the at-need annuity/home equity combination can address long term care needs.

Description: Abstract for “Home Equity and At-Need Annuities—A Dynamic Long-Term Care Funding Duo.” This paper describes the prevalence of the still uninsured long-term care financial risk, and how the at-need annuity/home equity combination can address long term care needs.

Description: In this article, the author talks about how China’s insurance industry is entering a transitional period characterized by greater focus on risk management and governance.

Description: Feature article discussing the pros and cons of insurance companies in stretch management, using dreams to set business targets with no idea how to get there.

Description: Feature article discussing the new SOA stipend awards and featuring interviews with the first recipients.

Description: Presidential address about changes in the actuarial world.

Description: In this article, the author compares sailing to risk management.

Description: Essay discussing cost, quality and access of healthcare and then describes the need for rationing.

Description: One of the significant changes for Baby Boomers approaching retirement has been the increased responsibility placed on individuals to make more decisions and take additional personal responsibility for their retirement planning. At the 2008 Society of Actuaries Annual Meeting, the authors presented a session focused on key decisions that individuals must make as they plan for retirement. This article summarizes the presentation at that session from two perspectives: that of an actuary, and that of a financial planner/wealth manager.

Description: Feature article discussing the SOA’s competency framework and how it provides direction for professional development.

Description: A call for essays issued by the SOA Health and Long Term Care Sections on the visions for the future of the U.S. health care system.

Description: The author reportsand reflectson the rich and diverse findings and viewpoints presented at the October, 2008 Future of Life Cycle Savings and Investment Conference held at the Boston University School of Management. Links to the papers presented and more details as to the conference, as well as to a video, are provided.

Description: An overview of the various track topics and sessions in the 9th Annual ILTCI Conference.

Description: This paper starts from the viewpoint that enterprise risk management [ERM] is a specific application of knowledge in order to control deviations from strategic objectives, shareholders’ values and stakeholders’ relationships. This study is looking for insights into how the application of knowledge management processes can improve the implementation of ERM.

Description: Article discussing the use of enterprise risk management in the health care industry.

Description: This article serves as a Solvency II primer by first introducing the Solvency II framework and then identifying several implementation issues that are still being resolved.

Description: This article provides some insights into risk appetite and how it relates to ERM.

Description: This article addresses the key capital and risk management issues immediately confronting the industry.

Description: This article provides the reader with some insights regarding tax planning under the new required methodology.

Description: This is a report on the PBITT Working Group's fourth survey to gather the assumptions actuaries use in pricing, reserving, and risk management of minimum guarantees on Variable Annuity products, such as death benefits, income benefits, withdrawal benefits and maturity benefits.

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: It is the belief of this author that the subprime mortgage mess was none other than a Ponzi scheme repackaged into 21st century financial engineering clothes. What makes this scheme particularly disastrous is that the 21st century Ponzi mortgages were packaged and sold to investors and then trillions of dollars of derivatives were constructed based on the underlying mortgages, magnifying the problem by orders of magnitude.

Description: The new ways of calculating capital requirements are relatively untested. We may be witnessing the results of such a test today. As of this writing, the global economy is almost surely entering a serious recession. One of the reasons for this appears to be inadequate capital provisioning. The failure of capital regimes to protect financial entities and, by extension, their customers has had unfortunate effects on the markets and economies of the world.

Description: Modern economies are based on the premise that all the main players look after themselves. The bankruptcy and limited liability laws gave property speculators and banks a put option on society so they could walk away from losses above their capital base, yet enjoy all the gains of such speculation. They acted in what they believed were their own interests. It seems that society – well aware of what was happening – did not effectively look after its own interest and now must pay the price.

Description: Property-liability insurers use reinsurance as a cost-efficient substitute for capital, but in a disruptive event, reinsurance prices and availability can change sharply.

Description: A collection of essays written on the current financial crisis, lessons learned and future implications.

Description: A Canadian discusses his experiences working in the emerging insurance market of Vietnam, which is rapidly growing and positioning itself in the current global market.

Description: The liquidity crisis and the insufficient depth of the market led to a strong correlation crisis: many risks that could be considered as close to mutually independent in the classical regime suddenly became strongly positively dependent. More correlation crisis may happen in the future. We need to be more careful with black-box tools and to train what I would define as “quanlitative analysts” “Quanls” in the Enterprise Risk Management ERM process, that is risk managers who are able to lead interdisciplinary ERM studies from a jointly qualitative and quantitative point of view, with an emphasis on dynamics.

Description: From a simple mathematical model of the underlying economics, I first predicted this crisis in July of 2004. An economic dynamic relating very low interest rates to the structure of the demand curve in the housing market made this outcome foreseeable, indeed inevitable. The current crisis had a mathematical cause. Essay on the collapse of the housing bubble.

Description: Part 2 of a six-part series on the evolution of risk management continues with this article on dynamic financial analysis.

Description: Update on the Standard Valuation Law amendments and the proposed Valuation Manual.

Description: This article aimed to make Liability Driven Investing LDI more accessible by providing a simple definition and by showing how plans of different sizes and circumstances may adopt an appropriate LDI approach.

Description: Attitudes on strategy and risk in reinsurance vary according to specific environmental circumstances for most companies. This article is an extract from the 2007 surveys in the U.S. market.

Description: This article is an interview with ‘pioneer’ Nooruddin [Rudy] S. Karsan, FSA, one of the co–founders of Kenexa® Corp., a leading end–to–end provider of software, proprietary content, services and process outsourcing, that enable organizations to more effectively recruit and retain employees. The company was founded in 1987 and started with two employees. Today Kenexa has 1,600 employees. Karsan discusses his life and entrepreneurial career. He enjoys managing and building businesses, and the challenging opportunities, but that's just one part of his life the other is focusing on serving humanity—the two basic words, he says, that define Kenexa. From ‘The Actuary Magazine’ Volume 5 Issue 4.

Description: This article describes how to help the client see that the pain of not having your product or service is greater than the pain of parting with his or her hard-earned dollars.

Description: This article examines the dynamic environment of the health care system in the United States and the challenges facing the health actuary.

Description: As we meet with pension plan sponsors and consultants across Canada we find that the subject of liability-driven investing LDI comes up repeatedly even when we do not initiate the discussion. We also find that LDI seems to mean something different to each person we meet. Is LDI just a new name for asset/liability management ALM? Or is LDI just about hedging interest rate risks with fancy securities? In this article we describe a framework for understanding what LDI is, how it relates to ALM, and how it can be used to solve real-life problems for Canadian pension funds.

Description: This paper argues that living longer with dignity is what is desirable and also that this should be an objective in designing specific social support systems for the elderly. The paper identifies and discusses certain areas where dignity is lacking or where the likelihood of living with dignity could be enhanced.

Description: Transcript of the Q&A period from session 2A.

Description: Congress has been debating a revision to Medicare Advantage payments including limiting payments to the Medicare Fee-For-Service FFS cost. A county-specific impact study to the benchmark payment rates for each county nationally based on the FFS limitation criteria was performed. This article includes results for Florida, California, Pennsylvania and New York.

Description: This paper incorporates a jump-diffusion process into the original Lee-Carter model, and uses it to forecast mortality rates and analyze mortality securitization.

Description: The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the research mission of the SOA, its inner workings, major efforts, funding and its unique qualities.

Description: Milliman, Inc. Milliman was retained by the Society of Actuaries SOA to perform certain actuarial analyses with respect to the Z-Factor methodology under a principles-based approach PBA to statutory reserve and capital. Under PBA, the Z-Factor is a measure of margin in excess of the best estimate assumptions embedded in the statutory reserves of a life insurance product or block of business.

Description: U.K. life insurers writing participating business are required by the Financial Services Authority to value their assets and liabilities on a market-consistent basis. The purpose of this paper is to: • Explain the valuation approach based on market-consistent values and its rationale. • Set out the issues faced by life insurers in implementing the regime. • Explain how insurers addressed these issues. • Explain the importance of the modeling techniques they used.

Description: This research report study uses the property/liability insurance industry as a research sample to examine how risk management, financial management, and capital management are related to each another. This allows reflecting such relationships in: 1. the managerial decisions in the choice of derivative and reinsurance use. 2. the allocation of asset risks. 3. the determination of underwriting activities as well as liabiity risks. 4. the adequacy of capital levels.

Description: Attempts to Quantify Potential Impact of Pandemic Influenza on the U.S. Life Insurance Industry

Description: Article from Pension Section News, May 2007, No. 64, discusses outcome-oriented approach to defined benefit investing. Instead of focusing on market indices, the focus is on achieving a specific real-world outcome for the defined benefit plan.

Description: Article from Pension Section News, May 2007, No. 64, discusses the trends in Europe on retirement plan designs and investments. European pension funds face challenges similar to those facing North American plans, so developments in Europe may help U.S. and Canadian plan sponsors find their way to a reasonable resolution of their current problems.

Description: The article gives background on the Brazilian insurance market and summarizes the newly released regulations which deal with revised reserving guidelines and new capital requirements. Additional capital requirements are promulgated for credit, market, legal, underwriting and operational risks.

Description: The objective of this paper is to explore the issues necessary to develop an integrated model of operational risk (OR) and financial risk (FR) within the framework of enterprise risk management (ERM). From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: This document provides key findings from the 2007 Risks and Process of Retirement Survey related to how respondents conceive retirement and how they retire.

Description: This article is the presentation given by David Blitzstein at the Future of Pensions track at the 2005 CCA/SOA Employee Benefits Spring Meeting. It discusses the unraveling of the defined benefit pension system and what must be done to save it. From Pension Section News, September 2006, No. 62.

Description: An executive perspective on strategy and risk in reinsurance.

Description: This paper discusses a theoretical framework for Enterprise Risk Management, risk dynamics within property-casualty insurance companies, empirical findings on widely used risk models, and examples of effective risk models.

Description: This article provides an update on principles-based reserves for life insurance.

Description: This is an interview with Shane Chalke, FSA, MAAA, who has started three businesses since 1983. Chalke, the youngest person ever to be elected to the SOA Board of Governors, has a knack for making the right business decisions. He tells how his actuarial background has played a role in his success, and what makes him a winner.

Description: Two committees continue work on experience studies that will provide a basis for new valuation mortality tables. This is an article about preferred and preneed valuation and the activity of these two committees to date.

Description: An interview with Jim Toole, lead researcher for SOA's pandemic research project. The project examines pandemic influenza and its implications to the life and health insurance industry.

Description: This paper describes the features of the Retirement Shares Plan RSP, a new concept in pension benefit design, as an alternative to traditional defined benefit or defined contribution retirement plans. An RSP transfers the invesmtent risk to plan pariticpants while retaining and pooling the longevity risk. From 2006 Re-Envisioning Retirement in the 21st Century Symposium, M-AS06-2.

Description: This article reviews Canada's Medicare Plan, the Chaoulli Supreme Court decision and looks at factors affecting waiting times. From Health Watch Newsletter, May 2006, Issue No. 52.

Description: This paper examines the concept on an Enterprise Risk Management Office, ERMO, and is investigated relative to the project management office, PMO, another enterprise-wide entity that has evolved in corporations. Guidelines and best practices for an ERMO are also suggested. From 2006 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS06-1.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to build a bridge between the traditional methods of looking at financial risk and insurance risk. The paper starts by explaining the concepts behind VaR models of economic capital used in banking. Differences between actuarial and financial views of risk are reviewed and explained. The paper concludes with proposing, developing, and parameterizing a true VaR model of insurance loss reserve risk, which combines several lines of business. From 2006 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS06-1.

Description: This is a 2006 draft of SOA Accreditation of Academic Actuarial Science Programs that was offered for review and comments. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2006.

Description: This paper examines the Australian actuarial qualification process from the perspective of what makes a good education system, and notes that there are a number of constraints imposed by the profession that impair the quality of students’ learning outcomes. The paper goes on to suggest how these pitfalls might be avoided in the interests of providing future actuaries with an opportunity to develop the attributes they will need for their professional careers. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2006.

Description: This article defines the distribution gap, customer's gap, and distributor's gap in the marketing and sales process. It offers solutions to close these gaps and therby create a more efficient distribution system that better meets customer's needs.

Description: This article gives an overview of retiree health aging curves. This overview is based on the author's paper entitled Aging Curves for Health Care Costs in Retirement which was published in the July, 2005 issue of the North American Actuarial Journal NAAJ. From Pension Section News, January 2006, No. 60.

Description: A letter to the editor regarding how the Social Security trustees project Social Security costs: Is it actuarial science or politics? From Pension Section News, January 2006, No. 60.

Description: This report is jointly sponsored by LIMRA International and the Society of Actuaries in collaboration with Ernst & Young. It describes Substandard Annuities and discusses the market opportunity for them, underwriting, the associated risk management issues, and the issues companies need to address when competing in the substandard annuity market. It discusses the single premium immediate annuity, SPIA, in relation to substandard annuities and the differences between the products.

Description: This report provides the results of a VA survey on policyholder behavior in the tail on VA products containing guaranteed minimum benefits.

Description: This paper considers the question of whether or not 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. The question is addressed by presenting the results of research consisting of 1 the review and analysis of the disclosures addressing issues of financial risk contained within financial statements issued from 1999 to 2004 by 25 major insurance companies operating in the US and 2 the interviewing of 5 insurance industry analysts to understand their perceptions of what is good and bad about financial disclosure practices of life insurance companies.

Description: This is an article about debt protection and credit insurance as products. From Small Talk Newsletter, November 2005, Issue No. 25.

Description: Formal report of the Accreditation Implementation Task Force to the Board of Directors at its June 2005 meeting. This document contains general objectives of the task force, membership and structure information, and the group's strategic plan for implementing an accreditation program for actuarial science academic programs.

Description: Panelists in session 13PD of the 2005 Valuation Actuary Symposium provide a brief overview of the emerging standards for investment and insurance, followed by a more in-depth discussion of key issues and recent developments.