Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society CAS and the Society of Actuaries SOA, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research.

Description: This paper explains the development of the credit derivative market, describes the most common types of credit derivatives, discusses how insurers can and do use these instruments and explains the role they played in the financial market turmoil of 2008.

Description: This monograph was presented at the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, held March 14-16 in Chicago. The author, writing from a property-liability insurance perspective, notes that capital allocation is a theoretical exercise because all of a firm’s capital could be depleted to cover a significant loss arising from any one segment. However, firms do need to allocate capital for pricing, risk management and performance evaluation. In this paper, the cost of capital in financial markets is incorporated into the Ruhm-Mango-Kreps algorithm to yield one allocation that reflects the true cost of capital an insurer would face. Table only.

Description: This monograph was presented at the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, held March 14-16 in Chicago. The author, writing from a property-liability insurance perspective, notes that capital allocation is a theoretical exercise because all of a firm’s capital could be depleted to cover a significant loss arising from any one segment. However, firms do need to allocate capital for pricing, risk management and performance evaluation. In this paper, the cost of capital in financial markets is incorporated into the Ruhm-Mango-Kreps algorithm to yield one allocation that reflects the true cost of capital an insurer would face.

Description: This is Table 2 from a March 2011 presentation at the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium entitled Capital Allocation in the Property-Liability Insurance Industry.