Description: This paper provides a novel approach to the valuation of the market value of economic surplus that is stable and immune from “market noise”.

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 paper demonstrates the use of Quantile Regression in the development and understanding of conditional value at risk (VaR) models for enterprise risk management.

Description: Capital allocation by percentile layer has important advantages over existing methods. It highlights a new formulation of value at risk and other capital standards, recognizes the capital usage of losses that do no extend into the tail and captures the disproportionate capital usage of severe losses. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: This paper expands upon current capital analysis by introducing a practical approach that considers the objectives of all stakeholders on an insurance company in setting appropriate capital targets. From 2006 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS06-1.

Description: The Market Cost of Capital approach has emerged as the standard for estimating risk margins for insurers' fair value balance sheets. This paper takes some of the ideas developed for valuing life insurance liabilities and applies them to the problem of valuing credit risky bonds. The basic idea is that credit spreads should cover the cost a) best estimate defaults plus the cost of holding capital for b) contagion risk (e.g. a credit crunch) and c) parameter risk, this risk that the best estimate is wrong and must be revised. We argue that the margins required for parameter risk can capture liquidity issues. In addition, the models developed here allow the cost of capital rate itself to be a random variable which allows credit spreads to open and close stochastically. Finally, the paper argues that it is reasonable to include something like AA best estimate default rates and liquidity spreads when valuing insurance liabilities. The main rationale for doing so is the idea that there are elements of the total credit risk issue that can be hedged between the assets and liabilities.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to build a bridge between the traditional methods of looking at financial risk and insurance risk. The paper starts by explaining the concepts behind VaR models of economic capital used in banking. Differences between actuarial and financial views of risk are reviewed and explained. The paper concludes with proposing, developing, and parameterizing a true VaR model of insurance loss reserve risk, which combines several lines of business. From 2006 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS06-1.

Description: In this paper, we formulate the Capital Allocation problem as an optimization problem in which we seek the mix of business that maximizes an insurance company’s Expected Net After Tax Income subject to a constraint on the Tail Value at Risk TVAR. Using the method of Lagrange multipliers, we demonstrate that the returns on the respective TVAR contributions, so-called RORAC, are equal across all lines of business when the mix of business is optimal. Although the discussions in this paper center on the TVAR, the conclusions hold true for any conditional expected value measure. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: As an alternative to the widely-used 'return on economic capital' RAROC, this paper proposes a performance measure consistent with standard valuation models, and discusses its implications for prudential regulation. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: This paper introduces a minor modification to the Wacek framework that restores market consistency and additivity. The modification shifts the basis of the cost-of-capital risk margin embedded in the fair value loss reserve from an insurer’s own solvency capital requirement with respect to its claim obligations as prescribed by Solvency II to the required market-clearing capital implied by those obligations, which depends not only on the internal characteristics of the unpaid claim portfolio but also on its correlation with the total market portfolio of unpaid claims.