Description: Hot topics and emerging trends in assumption development in US life insurance companies

Description: This paper recommends the practical application of new portfolio risk/return measurements to achieved and back tested stock portfolio performance. This new risk measurement process addresses the issue of infinite variances empirically observed in most stock return distributions. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: In response to the risks of embezzlement and branch mis-behavior, this paper describes an operational risk management framework for local Chinese securities companies and a set of tools to manage their branches. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

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: This article discusses the actuarial profession and its role and needed skill set development going forward in meeting the needs of businesses for risk management and capital management

Description: This case study is intended to educate insurance professionals on historical insurer impairments and insolvencies and possible future prevention indicators.

Description: The article outlines a shareholder value framework for pension risk management and applies this framework to pension funding decisions in light of rising PBGC premiums due to 2013’s BBA legislation. The article finds that the new legislation significantly incentivizes plan sponsors to increase pension funding. Moreover, many tax-paying pension plan sponsors can increase shareholder value by increasing pension plan contributions.

Description: In the June 2014 issue of Product Matters, Doug Robbins of Pacific Life authored a fascinating article entitled “Velocity of Diversification.” Therein, he proposed a pricing measure that describes the “…speed at which confidence in profitability is attained”. How can stochastic modeling of mortality be applied to analyze the velocity of diversification, and how would that measure be affected by volatility in the underlying assumptions?

Description: Insurance companies use derivatives to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios, including traditional asset/liability matching, dynamic hedging and static hedging. The authors explore how Solvency II will influence life insurers’ hedging strategies.

Description: This paper investigates the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risk type, which can be thought of as market risk. We analytically calculate their inter-risk correlation and show how inter-risk correlation bounds can be derived.