Description: This session from the 1995 SOA New York Meeting covers securitization of insurance liabilities. Securitization of insurance risk is an alternative risk transfer other than reinsurance based on the idea that investors participate directly in the insurance risk. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 2.

Description: This paper presents the modeling of mortality risk from exposure to a potential future extreme event such as a natural disaster and a terrorist attack, and its impact on life insurance. With this new model, quantities associated with the total force of mortality such as survival function are derived and the impact of mortality risk on life insurance is examined.

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: This paper presents best upper and lower bounds on the expected value of a reinsurance payment under the terms of a contract written on a random loss with known moments. Bounds on the expected exercise value of a financial option are considered also because the mathematical model used for valuing options is similar to that used in reinsurance net premium calculations. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1990 Vol. 1.

Description: Securitization of mortality risks is an alternative risk management tool that may have some advantages over reinsurance. The purpose of this paper is to study mortality-based securities, such as swaps and mortality bonds, and to price the proposed mortality securities. We focus on group life annuity data, although the techniques could be applied to other lines of annuity or life insurance.

Description: This paper describes methods for determining bounds on the price of derivative instruments, such as option on insurance futures, given only market information. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utilize natural hedging have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging to a firm that writes only one of the lines of business.