Description: This article reviews the dynamics of surrender risk, briefly discusses current valuations in the Interest Rate option markets and presents some tailored structured hedging instruments that can be used to manage this risk.

Description: The author uses football to demonstrate the axiom of downside risk, and how it can be applied in business situations when considering whether to use a conservative or aggressive approach.

Description: There are many factors involved with managing the financial condition of an insurance company and the factors usually fall into on of three categories: earnings management, capital management and risk management. Transfer pricing involves assigning a price for the use of funds that are transferred within the company.

Description: The article addresses the safe harbor guidance provided in Notice 2016-63 for 2017 CSO contracts satisfying the section 7702 reasonable mortality requirements

Description: A review of a webcast on Sarbanes-Oxley including a brief update on Sarbanes requirements, including some practical aspects of the Sarbanes “life cycle,” including living with Sarbanes beyond implementation.

Description: This article is the first of a two-part series on international developments. It discusses the actuarial focus on application of risk expertise to insurance and pensions vs. the newly developing focus on enterprise risk management.

Description: Panelists report on the status of activities by national associations in regard to risk-based capital requirements for health insurers. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: Although rate structures where low-cost cohorts subsidize high cost cohorts may be justified from a actuarial, marketing, or legal standpoint, the subsidization creates risks which must be understood and monitored. This article presents the concept of subsidization signature to measure and interpret the effects of rate subsidization, and to assess the sustainability of rating structures and the sensitivity of business mix assumptions.

Description: The selection of the economic capital calculation approach becomes more of a modeling decision. Now let us pause here and think about the arbitrage-free assumption at the beginning. At any time, there can be only one price on any asset. If the company considers the price calculated above as the fair price for its products, then it must hold true that the same price has to be arrived at if the company uses a real-world pricing approach instead of a risk-neutral approach. This gives us a very good basis to calibrate the appro- priate economic capital.

Description: A study on stochastic simulation literature as it applies to a health actuary.