Description: Interview with Peter Schaefer, CEO of Hannover Life Reassurance Company of America.

Description: Contemporary ERM has moved from an event-based view of risk to a hierarchical, systems-based approach. In order to operationalize such an approach, a methodology is proposed in this paper that draws on phylogenetic approaches that have been successfully developed for biological evolution. The technique and process provide an insight into the lineage, pace and impact of external conditions on the evolution of risks. They also provide a unique and rational classification of risk in an enterprise that can be used to optimize risk management resources. An example of a fictitious insurance company is used to illustrate the approach. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: A new reason for the inherent instability of the insurance business can be found in the literature of anthropology. The theory of plural rationalities, also known as Cultural Theory of Risk or simply Cultural Theory, posits that the world is populated by people with four fundamentally different attitudes toward risk. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: This is an in-depth look at the root causes of the subprime mortgage crisis and ways actuaries can eliminate the problems. From the Actuary Magazine, April/May 2010 – Volume 7 Issue 2.

Description: In the copula literature there are many bivariate distribution families but very few higher dimensional ones. Moreover, most of these are difficult to work with. Some of the bivariate families can be extended to more dimensions but in general the construction of distribution functions with more than two variables is a difficult problem. This paper introduces a construction method that is straightforward to implement and can produce multivariate distribution functions of any dimension.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society CAS and the Society of Actuaries SOA, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research.

Description: There appears to be many similarities between enterprise risk management techniques and the theory underlying the unified valuation system UVS. What are the challenges of each, and can the methods learn from each other? From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 2: Toronto Spring Meeting.June 20–22, 2001, Session 58PD.

Description: This article is about the Course 8 series. Course 8 provides candidates with essential advanced specialized education in one of seven practice areas: individual insurance, group life and health, managed care, U.S. pensions, Canadian pensions, finance, and investments.

Description: Presentation of proposals that are designed to further improve actuarial education by anticipating educational needs based on future change in the nature of actuarial work. The paper is divided into three sections: I. Current and Past Education of Actuaries II. Actuaries as Customers for Education and III. The Future Educational Needs of Actuaries and How These Needs Might Be Implemented. Followed by several submitted discussion papers.