Description: The insurance industry is known to have high operating expenses in the financial services sector. Insurers, investors and regulators are interested in models to understand the behavior of expenses. However, the current practice ignores skewness, occasional negative values as well as their temporal dependence. Addressing these three features, this presentation develops a longitudinal model of insurance company expenses that can be used for prediction, to identify unusual behavior, and to measure firm efficiency. Specifically, it uses a three parameter asymmetric Laplace density for the marginal distribution of insurers’ expenses in each year. Copula functions are employed to accommodate their temporal dependence. As a function of explanatory variables, the location parameter allows the presenters to analyze an insurer’s expenses in light of the firm’s characteristics. Their model can be interpreted as a longitudinal quantile regression.

Description: This is the first article in the new "Fireside Chat" series which intends to honor highly accomplised academic actuaries and allow them to share their insights into academic careers with young scholars. This article is mainly based on an interview with Dr. Edward Frees (Jed), one of the most accomplished actuarial professors.