Description: From a session at the annual meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in Chicago, Illinois, October 15-18, 2000 Discussion of purposes and approaches for creating interest-rate scenarios.

Description: This paper is to some extent a sequel to my previous paper A Bond Manager's Method for ALM published in Actuarial Research Clearing House Volume 1993.3. It borrows from that paper the concept of benchmark weights for measuring the sensitivity of the present value of a set of cash flows to changes in interest rates. However, a completely different approach to calculating benchmark weights is presented.

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: Discusses bond-default history in the United States, implications for insurance-company asset determination, regulatory concerns about recent investing by insurance companies in low-grade bonds, valuation-actuary needs to consider in these cases, and another suggested method for modeling the C-1 Risk in the context of the valuation actuary's cash flow review. From the 1987 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 13, No. 3.

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.