Description: In summary, the goal of this report is to foster better industry-wide education, training and practice that decreases the future range and scope of what leading risk management professionals will henceforth label as being unpredictable as events now commonly thought to be so.

Description: The Joint Risk Management Section is trying to develop better estimates of policyholder behavior in the tail [PBITT]. The mission of the PBITT working group is to examine and ultimately give guidance to actuaries on how to set policyholder assumptions in extreme scenarios. As part of its work, the PBITT working group issued its sixth survey to gather the range of assumptions actuaries use in pricing, reserving, and risk management of minimum guarantees on Variable Annuity products, such as death benefits, income benefits, withdrawal benefits and maturity benefits. This document contains the results of that survey.

Description: This article pertains to the optimal asset allocation of surplus from an insurance company model. The insurance company is represented by a compound Poisson risk process which is perturbed by diffusion and has investments. The investments are in both risky and risk-free types of assets similar to stocks/real estate and bonds. The insurance company can borrow at a constant interest rate in the event of a negative surplus. Numerical analysis appears to show that an optimal asset allocation range can be estimated for certain parameters and compared with insurance data. Using a conservative method to minimize the probability of ruin, a reasonable optimal asset allocation range for a typical insurance company is about 4.5 to 8.2 percent invested in risky stock/real estate assets. An inequality and the exact solution are obtained for the pure diffusion equation. In addition, the asymptotic form of the ruin probability is shown to be a power function.

Description: The Committee on Finance Research makes available a research report exploring the mechanics and implementation of economic capital programs for life insurance companies. Discussion items include common methods for calculating economic capital advantages and disadvantages of each method.

Description: This paper employs the theory of real option pricing to address problems in the area of operational risk management. Particularly, it develops a two-stage model to help firms determine the optimal triggers in the event of an influenza pandemic. The first stage proposes a regime-dependent epidemic model to simulate the spread of the virus, depending on whether the firm is active or inactive. The second stage views the reactivation decision as a call option and the suspension decision as a put option, and uses dynamic programming method to determine the optimal switching thresholds.

Description: This paper presents a model for analyzing the impact of underwriting cycles on an insurer’s surplus. The model allows the insurer to vary its security loading in response to the cycles, with a strategy parameter that indicates the extent to which the insurer follows the loading which prevails in the market. The insurer’s claim rate is also allowed to vary to reflect exposure changes that result from the insurer’s strategy. The paper analyzes ruin probabilities using both simulation and a Lundberg-type upper bound which is developed in the paper. It finds that the latter is suitable and convenient for comparing ruin probabilities under the different insurer strategies.

Description: Sometimes, rare things happen and the least expected occurs. Indeed, some events occur once or twice in a lifetime leaving little room to learn from experiences. In financial markets, extreme events, no matter how rare, could have a profound impact on a company or even the whole country. Insurers are also not free from the impact of catastrophic large-scale extreme events. As a result, with pervasive economic and financial revolutions sweeping our world and potential devastative catastrophes, the increasing interest in tail risk management is fuelled by practical issues, including investment downside risk and insurance catastrophe risk. Thus, developing statistical techniques to model extreme investment and insurance losses is certainly a major task for risk managers. the purpose of our paper is to apply moment methods to estimate the joint events such as concurrent extreme investment loss and insurance loss. A novel aspect of this article is that it takes into account the correlation between different assets and insurance lines of business.

Description: “Non-traditional” guarantees refer to guarantees that are in addition to traditional mortality, expense, and interest guarantees. Examples of such types of guarantees are death and living benefits on variable annuity contracts and no-lapse guarantees on universal life or variable universal life products. The purpose of this paper is to offer practitioners an overview of the various issues concerning the pricing of these guarantees, the many other issues which need to be analyzed and addressed in the determination of risks and the management of the block of business, and the results of a company survey of practices. This paper is based on the working knowledge of the authors, a broad compilation of literature and the company survey results. At the end of most sections of the paper, we have provided a list of resources which we have selected as some of the best sources available for those practitioners interested in researching the subject matter further.

Description: In December 1997, the Society of Actuaries held a conference whose focus was actuarial and financial modeling. During the course of that conference, one of the speakers mentioned a number of technologies his firm was using for modeling, which were either unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar to some of the audience. The purpose of this paper is to define each of the technologies mentioned during that presentation and to briefly describe their distinguishing characteristics. The technologies discussed in this paper are statistical pattern recognition [SPR], neural networks [NNs], genetic algorithms [GAs], simulated annealing, fractal analysis, chaos theory, rule induction, data fusion algorithms [DFAs], data compression, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning, and expert systems.

Description: This paper studies the statistical theory underlying minimum surplus required to protect a group insurer from the insurance, or C2, risk. Followed by 2 submitted discussion papers

Description: This paper outlines a method of parametric modeling that may be used to produce forecasts and forecast intervals that will convey a measure of the reliance that may be placed on the forecasts. Followed by 2 discussion papers submitted