Description: This paper defines Distributable Earnings as the generalized pricing and valuation framework for financial contracts containing the requirement to hold capital or reserves in support of the obligations. It examines the Market Value paradigm and its foundation arising from the pricing of fixed income securities. It reconciles these two methods, showing that market value methods ignore mandatory capital and reserve requirements, which carry both risk and cost. The paper makes the case for the Distributable Earnings framework, not Market Value, as the true basis for economic value for these financial contracts. Finally, it concludes that this framework must be employed in risk-management processes, else fail to recognize a significant source of risk.

Description: This paper defines Distributable Earnings as the generalized pricing and valuation framework for financial contracts containing the requirement to hold capital or reserves in support of the obligations. It examines the Market Value paradigm and its foundation arising from the pricing of fixed income securities. It reconciles these two methods, showing that market value methods ignore mandatory capital and reserve requirements, which carry both risk and cost. The paper makes the case for the Distributable Earnings framework, not Market Value, as the true basis for economic value for these financial contracts. Finally, it concludes that this framework must be employed in risk-management processes, else fail to recognize a significant source of risk.

Description: This paper advocates asset/liability management for pension plans. It identifies the economic factors that influence the economic value of liabilities and discusses the typical asset portfolio that results.

Description: The author discusses how sustainable enterprise risk management (SERM) is valuable for insurance companies and how actuaries can contribute to its development.

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: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: This article discusses a good way for insurance companies to calibrate economic capital (tail risk level) that is consistent with the market opinion on its risk. It also establishes a bridge between a risk neutral evaluation and a real world evaluation.

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”.