Description: The academy generator is widely applied in actuarial practice. Initially confined to regulatory reserving, companies are increasingly using the AAA/SOA generator over an ever widening range of applications testing the limits of the academy generator's intended function. The session will give a brief overview of the academy generator and the asset classes it can be used to model. It will also analyze the statistical properties of the academy scenarios and discuss the scenarios relative to standard validation criterion. Some of the challenges that actuaries face in using this framework will be reviewed and options for addressing these challenges will be offered.

Description: This paper examines the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds. Catastrophe risk cannot be hedged by traditional securities. Therefore the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds requires an incomplete markets setting and this creates special difficulties in the pricing methodology. The paper briefly discusses the theory of equilibrium pricing and its relationship to the standard arbitrage-free valuation framework. Equilibrium pricing theory is used to develop a pricing method based on a model of the term structure of interest rates and a probability structure for the catastrophe risk. This pricing methodology can be used to assess the default spread on catastrophe risk bonds relative to traditional defaultable securities.

Description: Summary of April 2020 Investment Section Town Hall and come additional commentary.

Description: This paper discusses the pricing of bond options and interest-sensitive cash flows by discrete state/time models such as binomial lattices. Current binomial models are faulty because the put-call parity relationship may not hold for all periods and there may exist negative interest rates. This paper presents a binomial model without such riskless arbitrage opportunities. This model allows the initial term structure of interest rates to be prescribed exogenously, so that the model price for each stream of fixed and certain cash flows is the market price.

Description: This session at the SOA 2003 Washington, DC Spring Meeting focuses on the issues involved in building a scenario generator. It covers the data set used to develop and calibrate the generator as well as a discussion of different approaches and their features. Implementation is addressed along with potential pitfalls.

Description: Overview of Investment Section activity and vision ahead.