Description: From a session at the Spring meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Antonio, Texas, June 14-15, 2004 The panelists discuss the benefits of hedging variable annuity guarantees, the challenges they face and how they keep score.

Description: Studies default risk through the two-sided exit problem of a time-homogeneous di§usion process with tax payments of loss-carry-forward type and obtains explicit formulas for the exit probabilities. If the lower boundary is understood as the default threshold, then the nondefault probability is solved as a special case. A sufficient and necessary condition for the tax identity is discovered.

Description: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: From a session at the Spring meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Antonio, Texas, June 14-15, 2004 This session covers different methods for estimating future volatility of financial markets, how to predict the effect of volatility on insurance company results, alternative approaches to managing volatility and the impact on volatility management on the choice of modeling method.

Description: Article AERF in The Actuary, May 1979, Volume 13, Number 5