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

Description: Presented at June 1996 Spring Meeting. This session presents various perspectives on RBC ratios, including pricing, solvency, and the view of company management.

Description: Article discusses possible effects of negative interest rates on product development, risk management, investment management and in-force management.

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: 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: Scenario analysis and stress tests based on consideration of shock events and their possible repercussions can provide useful information to management and regulators on a company’s resiliency through a chain of events, as well as support the consideration of a firm’s operations as an integral part of a wider financial system. We discuss how scenario analysis and stress testing can be used to define a company’s risk appetite, which is at the core of a well-embedded ERM framework. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: An insurance product’s return on required equity demonstrates how successfully its results are covering the company’s basic capital. Using some simplified assumptions, it is possible to calculate this return ratio and decompose it without a full projection of liabilities.

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.

Description: This paper demonstrates the use of Quantile Regression in the development and understanding of conditional value at risk (VaR) models for enterprise risk management.