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: 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: A comprehensive analysis of the current economic crisis and risk management that considers the social and political behavior of people.

Description: This paper describes the use of the Moses software package to model variable annuities with multiple guarantees. Pricing and risk management are discussed.

Description: Some of the uncertainties related to catastrophe models are explored, leading to the suggestion that the actuary is well suited to understand and use these in the context of an ORSA exercise. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: In order for actuaries to play a valuable role in the realm of enterprise risk management ERM, they must provide value-added advice and quantitative analyses. In this paper, the authors use stochastic simulation technology to present a risk metric for defined benefit pension plans that provides improved measures of the plan’s solvency and provides a tool for pension plan managers to determine the value of risk mitigation activities.

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: Essays advocating for incentive compensation linked to the level of risk in an organization.

Description: This paper is Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2, “An Alternative Approach to Capital Allocation,” discusses using risk-replicating techniques that directly calculate the cost of capital. Such techniques can be used as a substitute for capital allocation. This paper expands upon current capital analysis by introducing a practical approach that considers the objectives of all stakeholders of an insurance company in setting appropriate capital targets.

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.