Description: 2011 SOA ERM Symposium, Chicago. This paper addresses the contradiction between the financial theory of hedging and management practice. It also examines how consistent hedging policy is incompatible with management’s competencies and role in the company, requiring management to form strong future price expectations. Finally, this paper describes a process that management actually follows when making decisions about hedging and stress the role of the expectations discrepancy in this process.

Description: By establishing insurance risk as an asset class, participants will provide the insurance industry with vast pools of capital to mitigate catastrophic risk through the use of new nontraditional reinsurance products. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: Successful healthcare reform: First, it must help that must keep healthy people healthy. Second, it must help people mitigate or eliminate the health-risks associated with unhealthy lifestyle behavior choices, and Third, it must ensure the provision of evidence-based care to those who are ill.

Description: Actuaries measure, model, and manage risks. Risk associated with the investment function is a major uncertainty faced by many insurance companies. Actuaries should have knowledge of the asset side of the balance sheet of an insurance company and how it relates to the liability side. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: The concept of crosshedging gives us the key to the actuarial understanding of most new tools arising in the area of alternative risk transfer mechanisms. Securitization of insurance, which is the theme of this symposium can, as I see it, almost always be seen as an exercise in crosshedging. The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: This paper reviews the main methodological questions underlying the theoretical pricing of catastrophe insurance futures. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI978-1.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to help practitioners and regulators more accurately quantify the potential impact of market risk on insurance products with equity-linked guarantees. To this end, this paper examines time series model selection and assessment based on residuals, with a focus on regime switching models. Also it discusses the difficulties in defining residuals for such processes and propose several possible alternatives. We determine that a stochastic approach to defining the residuals is the only way to generate residuals that are normally distributed under the model hypothesis.

Description: This paper examines different objectives in managing credit concentration risk. The suitability of different measures and presentation techniques is discussed and illustrated in the context of a case study.

Description: There is no right price for a piece of insurance. There is simply the transacted market price, which is high enough to bring forth sellers and low enough to induce buyers. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.