Description: Presented at May 1985 Spring Meeting. Discusses: Target surplus formulas for specific product lines, Projecting product line surplus needs, How cost of capital is charged to product lines, Criteria to use in allocating capital to or withdrawing capital from specific product lines, Differing techniques appropriate for stock and mutual companies, Differing techniques appropriate for the United States and Canada, How capital allocation relates to regulatory requirements, How capital allocation relates to competition in other industries.

Description: The purpose of the article is to highlight how a person or organization can excel in both a highly-competitive expert-driven environment and one where the environment is less so. One should focus on what can be done well and delegate the remaining tasks to those who are better at performing them. One should understand the environment they are operating in, how it impacts them, and how it may change through time. The principles have application to investment management, investment performance, organizational performance, business development, career progression and economics.

Description: The Market Cost of Capital approach has emerged as the standard for estimating risk margins for insurers' fair value balance sheets. This paper takes some of the ideas developed for valuing life insurance liabilities and applies them to the problem of valuing credit risky bonds. The basic idea is that credit spreads should cover the cost a) best estimate defaults plus the cost of holding capital for b) contagion risk (e.g. a credit crunch) and c) parameter risk, this risk that the best estimate is wrong and must be revised. We argue that the margins required for parameter risk can capture liquidity issues. In addition, the models developed here allow the cost of capital rate itself to be a random variable which allows credit spreads to open and close stochastically. Finally, the paper argues that it is reasonable to include something like AA best estimate default rates and liquidity spreads when valuing insurance liabilities. The main rationale for doing so is the idea that there are elements of the total credit risk issue that can be hedged between the assets and liabilities.

Description: This paper provides a novel approach to the valuation of the market value of economic surplus that is stable and immune from “market noise”.

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: In this paper, we formulate the Capital Allocation problem as an optimization problem in which we seek the mix of business that maximizes an insurance company’s Expected Net After Tax Income subject to a constraint on the Tail Value at Risk TVAR. Using the method of Lagrange multipliers, we demonstrate that the returns on the respective TVAR contributions, so-called RORAC, are equal across all lines of business when the mix of business is optimal. Although the discussions in this paper center on the TVAR, the conclusions hold true for any conditional expected value measure. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Key points of the conceptual framework of China’s new solvency system, the “China Risk Oriented Solvency System” (C-ROSS).

Description: Research projects in pension - Pension Risk Management: Derivatives, Fiduciary Duty and Process.

Description: This presentation is a panel discussion, session number 43PD, from the 2002 Valuation Actuary Symposium, held September 19-20 in Lake Buena Vista, FL. The panelists provide an overview of the current risk-based-capital [RBC] requirements for life insurers, as well as recent and potential changes to RBC. They discuss reinsurance, including off shore solutions. Recent changes they discuss include Phase I C-3, interest-rate risk for annuities and single premium life, common stock changes, and deferred-tax recognition. The panelists also discuss the proposed stochastic modeling standard C-3 Phase II for variable annuities. Discussion from participants is included.

Description: This paper addresses the allocation of solvency capital in multi- line financial businesses. Although this paper is uniformly applicable to financial enterprises of all types, the terminology in the paper is mainly that of insurance. The TailVaR risk measure is extended in a natural way to allocating capital to each of the business units. This method of allocation allocates capital in a way that is invariant over the method of decomposing the enterprise into business units. Analytic results are derived in the case of multivariate Normal risks. The key result of this paper is that the TailVaR-based proportional allocation of total required capital is identical to that based on mean-variance considerations analogous to the CAPM in the case of the multivariate Normaldistribution.