Description: This article analyzes a fixed premium interest sensitive life contract with the objectives of developing an approach to estimating its market value and assessing various notions of its duration. The results of these analyses have implications for market value accounting of life insurance liabilities and for life company portfolio management.

Description: Panelists at this session of the 2000 Valuation Actuary Symposium discuss recent developments in the area of fair-value financial reporting including recent FASB developments, international accounting standards, and different approaches to valuing liabilities.

Description: 1999 SOA Annual Meeting, San Francisco. The panel examined the current efforts of several organizations to craft the next century's insurance valuation framework, and how these efforts are reshaping the way we will do business in the future.

Description: 1999 SOA Annual Meeting, San Francisco. The panelists reviewed emerging proposals for reporting liabilities at fair value. Topics covered: 1. The Fair-Value Symposium in March 1999. 2. The measures and objectives of fair-value reporting. 3. The implication for the income statement and balance sheet. 4. The alternatives to fair-value reporting, such as embedded value. 5. The impact on asset/liability management. 6. The status of deliberations at the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the AICPA.

Description: This session 30 PD of the New Orleans Annual Meeting discusses how several organizations, with representation from a number of countries, are currently drafting new standards to create uniformity across nations. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 3.

Description: This presentation is a panel discussion from the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Society of Actuaries, held October 20-23 in Toronto. Noting that the regulatory authorities have been talking about the need to modify GAAP and statutory balance sheets to more closely reflect market values, with most of the focus on the market value of assets, the panelists discuss current regulatory thinking, including with respect to disclosures, problems associated with looking only at assets [and not liabilities], practical implications, and use of results as a management tool. From the Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 17, No. 4B.

Description: Discusses the content of the Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 157, Fair Value Measurements and implementation challenges.

Description: Update on research projects sponsored by the Financial Reporting Section.

Description: The author refers to a separate article in this edition of Risks and Rewards, in which Babbel, Gold and Merrill provide an excellent exposition of three approaches to present-valuing a series of risky cash flows and provide several insights into the way modern finance theory deals with risk. The purpose of this article is to bring these insights to the world of insurance risks and view them in relation to existing actuarial techniques. The author also discusses direct discounting and the actuarial appraisal method and their consistency.

Description: This article provides a summary of the research paper and Excel-based tool that can be found on the SOA’s website at Regulatory Capital Adequacy for Life Insurance Companies: A Comparison of Four Jurisdictions | SOA.