Description: The essay describes an application of “Do Jumps Matter in the Long Term? A Tale of Two Horizons,” by Jean-François Bégin and Mathieu Boudreault, published in the North American Actuarial Journal online Jan 5, 2021

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ (SOA) Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program in collaboration with the International Association of Black Actuaries (IABA) and the Organization of Latino Actuaries (OLA) are pleased to publish this essay collection on Aging and Retirement Issues in People of Different Races and Ethnicities. This effort explores how differences in wealth and retirement outcomes are experienced by people of different races and ethnicities and promotes a better understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the differences.

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ (SOA) Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program in collaboration with the International Association of Black Actuaries (IABA) and the Organization of Latino Actuaries (OLA) are pleased to publish this essay collection on Aging and Retirement Issues in People of Different Races and Ethnicities. This effort explores how differences in wealth and retirement outcomes are experienced by people of different races and ethnicities and promotes a better understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the differences.

Description: An essay received in response to the Committee on Post Retirement Needs and Risks Call for Essays exploring ideas and thoughts on working in retirement and phased retirement programs.

Description: A collection of essays received in response to the Committee on Post Retirement Needs and Risks Call for Essays exploring ideas and thoughts on working in retirement and phased retirement programs.

Description: A collection of essays in response to a call for essays aimed to gather perspectives, opinions and data on how to advance the state of effective retirement planning tools, products, and strategies to assist individuals, financial advisors, employers, and other stakeholders.

Description: These essays focus on unknown known where we have data but the future looks different from the past.

Description: View the Product Development Section: 2019 Call for Essays Contest Rules.

Description: These essays encourage actuaries to share how they incorporate financial risks of environmental sustainability into their work for employers or clients.

Description: Examination of current funding models of Canadian public pension plans and a proposal for funding reform to improve intergenerational equity & sustainability.

Description: 2 public plans improve intergenerational equity & sustainability: DC plan, active employees & lifetime benefit, retirees. 2 tools measure effectiveness.

Description: We discussed impacts of procrastination and strategies to harness the power of inertia to aid individuals in their pursuit of future financial well-being.

Description: How assumptions like market returns and variable like saving rate should be incorporated into sound financial planning. How to analyze retirement readiness.

Description: This collection of essays provides a thought-provoking array of views and perspectives related to financial wellness.

Description: E-book contains 16 topical essays that express the opinions and thoughts of a number of authors on the subject of Investment Fallacies.

Description: Investment Fallacies: Mathematical modeling of social phenomena

Description: Investment Fallacies: The Myth of Time Diversification

Description: When using models a company can develop blind spots to risks. This article explains how to recognize the weaknesses in the models by recognizing the markets response to the innovation within the insurance product. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: The ORSA should be more than a compliance requirement -- its process should be an integral element of a company's governance and risk and strategic planning process used by both management and the board on a regular feedback loop basis. Similar to that used for ERM, it along with a carefully constructed set of metrics should serve as the springboard to be used to identify, control and mitigate short- and long-term risks, as well as to enable exploitation of opportunities to add shareholder and policyholder value. Risk can represent an opportunity from which insurers can leverage their knowledge and risk management capabilities to find and maintain a competitive edge. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: Collection of essays received in response to the “Systemic Risk, Financial Reform and Moving Forward from the Financial Crisis” call for essays.

Description: Potential actions are recommended for key stakeholders to manage the unintended consequences of systemic risk “brewing” within the retirement system today.

Description: Response to Life Insurance 2020 Foresight – A Call for Essays. An essay stating the author’s vision for the future of the life insurance sector with emphasis on a change to life insurance pricing using biological age rather than actual age.

Description: Essay offers a vision of health care where everyone is covered, everyone is eligible, receives fair pricing, receives vital information and is taxed the same.

Description: U.K. life insurers writing participating business have, since the end of 2004, been required by their regulator, the Financial Services Authority FSA, to value their assets and liabilities on a market-consistent basis. The purpose of this paper is to explain the new valuation approach based on market-consistent values and its rationale set out the issues faced by life insurers in implementing the new regime and explain how these issues have been addressed by insurers.

Description: The problem facing risk distributors is that product pricing is sticky, whereas the market price of risk can be quite volatile. This disconnection can become particularly severe during market downturns. The problem facing risk insurers is maintaining market share in benign market conditions when the market price of risk is low. Strategies that are dynamic with respect to time are difficult in practice, since they require more capital in volatile markets.

Description: It is the belief of this author that the subprime mortgage mess was none other than a Ponzi scheme repackaged into 21st century financial engineering clothes. What makes this scheme particularly disastrous is that the 21st century Ponzi mortgages were packaged and sold to investors and then trillions of dollars of derivatives were constructed based on the underlying mortgages, magnifying the problem by orders of magnitude.

Description: The new ways of calculating capital requirements are relatively untested. We may be witnessing the results of such a test today. As of this writing, the global economy is almost surely entering a serious recession. One of the reasons for this appears to be inadequate capital provisioning. The failure of capital regimes to protect financial entities and, by extension, their customers has had unfortunate effects on the markets and economies of the world.

Description: Modern economies are based on the premise that all the main players look after themselves. The bankruptcy and limited liability laws gave property speculators and banks a put option on society so they could walk away from losses above their capital base, yet enjoy all the gains of such speculation. They acted in what they believed were their own interests. It seems that society – well aware of what was happening – did not effectively look after its own interest and now must pay the price.

Description: Property-liability insurers use reinsurance as a cost-efficient substitute for capital, but in a disruptive event, reinsurance prices and availability can change sharply.

Description: The liquidity crisis and the insufficient depth of the market led to a strong correlation crisis: many risks that could be considered as close to mutually independent in the classical regime suddenly became strongly positively dependent. More correlation crisis may happen in the future. We need to be more careful with black-box tools and to train what I would define as “quanlitative analysts” “Quanls” in the Enterprise Risk Management ERM process, that is risk managers who are able to lead interdisciplinary ERM studies from a jointly qualitative and quantitative point of view, with an emphasis on dynamics.

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: 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 considers the question of whether the growth in the size of financial statements witnessed over the last several years has yielded an increase in the quality of disclosure around issues of financial risk and to what extent this disclosure is satisfying the perceived needs of readers of the financial statements, as represented by the investment analyst community.

Description: This paper examines how incentives created by management structures and performance measurement systems affect a corporation’s risk management decisions.

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