Description: Abstract of paper entitled 'The Financial Crisis and Lessons for Insurers' published by the SOA. The paper analyzes the causes of the recent crisis, insurance companies’ exposure levels, and potential strategies to reduce the likelihood of future risks

Description: This abstract describes a paper that reviews earlier research and identifies the major factors affecting the use of futures hedging by commodity producers.

Description: This abstract describes a presentation that focuses on the mathematical underpinnings associated with the process of discounting future cash flows.

Description: The article provides an introduction to the Stock Value Approach to enterprise risk management (ERM). A clear path toward implementation of comprehensive and pragmatic ERM is shown. The framework is underpinned by a company's goals as they relate to growth of the value of the company stock price.

Description: In a well-designed enterprise risk management (ERM) program, the firm integrates risk management into the strategic planning process, addressing strategic risk, financial risk, operational risk and hazard risk under a single overarching process. This is particularly important to large financial firms, such as property and casualty (P&C) insurers, which face a diverse set of risks. In contrast to previous studies that document a significant product line and geographic diversification discount relative to more focused competitors, our analysis suggests that firms with effective ERM programs exhibit a performance premium. Using the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) ERM ratings from 2006 to 2012, we find that product line diversification has a significant positive effect on value for more diversified firms with well-implemented ERM programs, as compared to those with weak ERM.

Description: The abstract on the paper Extending ERM to Multi-Employer Pension Plans.

Description: Financial regulators, rating agencies and many commentators have blamed weak Risk Culture for many of the large losses and financial company failures of the past decade. But their exposition regarding a strong Risk Culture only goes as far as describing a few of the risk management practices of an organization and falls far short of describing the beliefs and motivations that are at the heart of any culture. This discussion will present thinking about how the fundamental beliefs of Neo Classical Economics clash with the recommended risk practices and how the beliefs that underpin Enterprise Risk Management are fundamentally consistent with the recommended risk management practices but differ significantly from Neo Classical Economics beliefs.

Description: The paper takes a critical stand on best ERM practices as proposed by the Cultural Theory of Risk and especially by the work of Ingram, Underwood and Thompson (IUT). The paper claims that both mainstream-type ERM practices ("rigid ERM") and IUT's alternative ("fluid ERM") fail in critical parts to account how risk managers, in everyday normal tasks, develop their ERM practices in a context-dependent way. Context-dependent ERM takes into account the whole context, that is both the recognition that risk environment changes and the need for the firm to develop a stable (yet open to meaningful changes) sociotechnical identity with a consistent risk attitude and appetite.

Description: This paper develops a conceptually rigorous, but practical, approach to estimating risk margins that are consistent with actuary's cost of capital concept.

Description: This abstract describes a presentation that gives examples of more successful and less successful communications from the author’s research experience in actuarial risk management.