Description: A discussion of alternative meanings to “Best” in best estimate. When one is trying to estimate a result that is normally distributed, the mean, median and mode will all equal one another. However if the results are not normally distributed, different variance metrics will result in different “best” estimates. When different parts of a financial statement use different criteria for measuring best estimates and different processes for handling variances, the results can be volatile, unpredictable and perhaps unreasonable.

Description: Research report describing the results of an Emerging Risks Survey conducted in 2010. This survey attempts to track the thoughts of risk managers about emerging risks across time. The new top five are: 1. Fall in value of US Dollar. 2. International terrorism. 3. Chinese economic hard landing. 4. Oil price shock. 5. Failed and failing states.

Description: Investment Fallacies: The Fable of the Storyteller and the Market

Description: E-book contains 16 topical essays that express the opinions and thoughts of a number of authors on the subject of Investment Fallacies.

Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting in New York. This session is about an intercompany study on credit risk of private placement bonds and commercial mortgages. The development of the study, results for the 1986-1989 period, ongoing nature of the study, and company leverage were discussed.

Description: Panelists at this session of the SOA 1998 Maui I Spring Meeting presents their approach to an integrated risk management framework that assesses the level of risk in the organization and where it lies on the balance sheet.

Description: This paper introduces a new direction for evaluating numerically survival probabilities pointed out by H. Seal in his book ‘Survival Probabilities: The goal of Risk Theory’. Some of special cases can be considered as a weighted Poisson process with an infinitely divisible mixing distribution. This property is well known for the negative binomial case [gamma mixing distribution].

Description: Panel dicussion on the need for information to keep a block of long-term care insurance profitable: what the business risks are, what is being done to mitigate them, what kind of reports are needed, and how these differ from reporting on other types of health insurance.

Description: Given a financial transaction we are often interested in the number of internal rates of return [yield rates] and their location. From an actuarial point of view, the fundamental question is to identify those transactions with a single yield rate, or a single rate in some interval such as the positive reals. In this paper we are concerned with this counting problem. We survey various results concerning this problem, and provide a unifying approach together with some new insights.

Description: Random sum models with compound distributions are used extensively in modeling of insurance risks. Unfortunately, the compound distributions themselves are awkward to evaluate. Consequently, various numerical and analytical approximative techniques have been used. In this talk we derive various upper and lower bounds on the tails of compound distributions. Some notions in reliability theory are used.