Description: Actuaries and other managers of risk identify factors in modeling insurance risks because [i] they feel that these factors may cause the outcome of a risk, or [ii] that the factors can be managed, thus allowing analysts a degree of control over the system risk. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for quantifying the relative importance of a source of risk. The intent is that, with a quantitative measure of relative importance, risk managers will be able to sharpen their intuition about the relative importance of risks and be better custodians of financial security systems. This paper proposes a measure of relative importance that has its roots in both the statistics and economics literatures. The measure is intuitively appealing when assessing the effectiveness of basic risk management techniques including risk exchange, pooling and financial risk management. The risk measure is also shown to be useful in multivariate situations where several factors affect a risk simultaneously. The paper illustrates this usefulness by considering a pool of policies that is subject to mortality, the risk of a disaster that is common to all policies, and to a common investment environment.

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: 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.