Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

Description: In 2007 the International Accounting Standards Board IASB released a discussion paper proposing a new accounting model for insurance contracts, known as the current exit value model. One aspect of the proposed accounting model is that claim liabilities would need to include explicit margins satisfying certain criteria. Currently it is common for U.S. medical insurers to include explicit margins in their claim liabilities. However, we demonstrate that the margin approach most commonly used today by U.S. medical insurers does not satisfy the objectives articulated in the IASB discussion paper regarding the role of margins. We then propose a new formula for including explicit margins in U.S. medical insurance claim liabilities in a manner that is more compatible with the principles articulated in the IASB discussion paper. Finally, we illustrate our proposed claim liability formula using an example drawn from real-life data.

Description: Insurance company financial reporting and performance measurement are going through a significant transformation. Insurers are beginning to look at their business based on what many refer to as the “economic value framework.” Under this framework insurance companies determine the economic value of the capital invested in their business and the economic value of earnings to derive a risk-adjusted return on capital. Standard setters, primarily European insurance regulators through Solvency II and the International Accounting Standards Board through IFRS Phase II, propose adopting many of these concepts for solvency and performance reporting.

Description: This study identifies large categories of conditions that long-term care insurance LTCI carriers previously might have avoided because of a lack of data. This study estimates claims, mortality, and lapse rates for several conditions. Many of the conditions are further analyzed into risk categories, some of which would be insurable at standard rates.

Description: The purpose of this discussion is to introduce a few additional points and discuss how different assumptions will alter the results in some cases.

Description: This paper illustrates a current approach to capital allocation, referred to herein as Tail Contribution Analysis TCA, using it to evaluate the impact of changes in an insurer’s operations by allocating capital to individual lines of business. It then highlights a common problem in the implementation of the procedure arising from reserve volatility and briefly notes the failure of the methodology to account for a firm’s changing levels of risk under various strategies. Finally, it introduces an alternative method for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. We will discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, we will illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: This paper introduces a rich stochastic modeling framework for understanding risks in multiple-decrement contracts. The example in the paper is a 20-year Term insurance contract. Not only are mortality and lapsation considered stochastic, but the parameters governing them are. For example, mortality risk is composed of four risk elements, including error generated in the underwriting process, volatility around the best estimate, catastrophic events that impact mortality, and the trend in mortality improvement or deterioration. When stochastically modeled, the relative contribution and risk profile of each risk element can be evaluated. Generating stochastic mortality results provides a distribution of results that an organization faces and the severity and incidence of the tail events.

Description: This paper will provide demonstrations of the following three statements: That the calculation of principles-based reserves should ignore federal income taxes That the currently required statutory deferred tax calculation would need to be changed to permit an appropriate deferred tax asset to accompany such reserve so that the result can be correctly principles-based on a post-tax basis That the Tax DAC, pursuant to Section 848 of the Internal Revenue Code, is effectively a negative tax reserve.

Description: The author has gathered a variety of resources, general theories, and specific practices concerning spreadsheet errors and their avoidance.

Description: This report summarizes the results of a research project undertaken by the Society of Actuaries to study the possible effects of the International Accounting Standards Board’s IASB Discussion Paper describing its Preliminary Views on Insurance Contracts on nine representative U.S. life, health and annuity products.