Description: In this session, we will explore investment solutions that aim to maintain the long-term viability of a pension plan, with considerations on hedging interest rates, credit, inflation, longevity and other risks, while accounting for the many particularities associated with underlying liabilities and their corresponding ramifications.

Description: Part II of a two-part series discussing individual market evolution from before the ACA through President Trump's first term.

Description: This project forecasts China's population structure in the coming decades by projecting both the mortality and fertility rates of the Chinese population.

Description: China’s pension system has transformed from traditional retirement system based on command economy to modern pension system based on market economy.

Description: In this article, we will describe EY’s five-pillar approach that balances practicality with comprehensiveness, and how this applies to LTC model validation.

Description: A plain-language, high-level explanation of employer withdrawal liability issues, including how they grew to be large and barriers to their collection.

Description: Derives appropriate hedge ratios for CPPI strategies, taking into account discrete hedge times and market dislocations (gap risk).

Description: A brief description of current events and techniques that may impact trend models.

Description: This study is intended to educate insurance professionals on historical insurer impairments and insolvencies and possible future prevention indicators.

Description: This article describes changes to financial reporting for variable annuities under US GAAP, IFRS and Statutory regulations, and implications for hedging.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: Recaps the evolution of VA products and hedging programs. Reflects on strategic considerations that contributed to relative performance in this market.

Description: In this paper, we derive three important longevity Greeks on the basis of an extended version of the Lee-Carter model that incorporates stochastic volatility.

Description: Models are useful in illustrating various facets of complex phenomena, but they are inherently limited.

Description: Study of the impact of IRS proposed mortality tables on private sector pension plan costs, including liabilities, contributions and PBGC premiums.

Description: The article discusses the sustainability of the ACA individual market from a public entitlement standpoint. A key point of measuring sustainability is the reliance on market forces rather than federal budget constraints. The article explains why an actuarial viewpoint of sustainability is necessary to a greater extent than other public assistance and social insurance programs. The article challenges actuaries to be a bold, objective voice in a space that is full of opinionated but often uninformed viewpoints.

Description: Reviews basic desirable features in an economic scenario generator. Discusses basics of model structure and validation process

Description: Explains the method used to calculate Liquidity Cost Score and Price Impact Score. Describes the rationale for and applications of these methods.

Description: The author constructed the efficient frontier of new business sales by modeling the embedded value and economic capital against a universe of possible growth rates of the three lines of business in a typical three-year planning horizon. The ERM function can use the efficient frontier of new business to provide a more rigorous analysis of the impact of growth rates on the firm’s overall capital efficiency and value creation, hence forming a feedback loop with the businesses in the planning process to optimize the growth strategy.

Description: This article delves into the challenges and opportunities of the Asian insurance market, focusing on insurance investment management.

Description: Insurance companies use derivatives to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios, including traditional asset/liability matching, dynamic hedging and static hedging. The authors explore how Solvency II will influence life insurers’ hedging strategies.

Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: Essential Health Benefits and Actuarial Value

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: Feature article describing the events of the Valuation Actuary Symposium in Indianapolis, In.

Description: This scorecard will keep section members informed about research projects sponsored or co-sponsored by the section.

Description: Interview with Peter Schaefer, CEO of Hannover Life Reassurance Company of America.

Description: Research is a primary mission of the Financial Reporting Section and is the largest use of section dues. This scorecard will keep section members informed about research projects sponsored or co-sponsored by the section.

Description: The article is a case study of various actuarial concepts invovled in the design and implementtion of the AQC - a global budget provider payment arrangement implemented by Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA.

Description: This scorecard informs section members about research projects in progress and recently completed that are sponsored or co-sponsored by the section.

Description: Considerations when developing internal models for use in Solvency II.

Description: Information regarding the Economic Scenario Generator to be used when calculating Principle-based reserves and implementing VM20.

Description: A collection of essays that discuss the principles and ideas underpinning the ORSA initiative and the risk metrics used for decision making.

Description: The different broad purposes served by the material change concept under federal tax law are outlined. More specific material change and similar issues that are pertinent to particular Code provisions and guidance from the IRS that has addressed those issues are also addressed. In the final part of this article, authors comment on whether any overarching principles can be gleaned that can assist insurers and policy owners in making decisions about whether particular changes can safely be made, and thoughts are offered with respect to future potential IRS guidance that would be helpful as taxpayers navigate these often uncertain waters.

Description: This paper demonstrates that extreme value theory (EVT) can be used as a tool to model policyholder behavior in the extreme tail. This paper applies EVT to the study of variable annuity dynamic lapse behavior in the extreme tail. It illustrates a process whereby a company can fully model policyholder behavior, including the extreme tail, with existing data. No judgment about the extremal behavior is necessary.

Description: This report, is an extension of the Society of Actuaries' November 2010 research project on the financial reporting effect of IASB’s exposure draft on the accounting of liabilities for term life and long term care insurance contracts to examine the effect on certain of these contracts to alternatives that have been discussed in treatment of discounting, expenses, and subsequent measurement of margins.

Description: Actuaries have traditionally recognized the links between risk and value, and in recent years have begun to incorporate aspects of modern financial economic theory into their traditional valuation and risk management approaches. As a result, there has been an increasing trend in the incorporation of explicit market-based risk adjustments into valuations, whether for internal or external purposes. The use of market-based metrics to reflect risk in valuations is becoming increasingly widespread—in fact, major external standard setters, including FASB, IASB, CFO Forum and the various parties setting standards for Solvency II, have prescribed varying levels of use of market-based metrics to measure risk in valuations. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Contemporary ERM has moved from an event-based view of risk to a hierarchical, systems-based approach. In order to operationalize such an approach, a methodology is proposed in this paper that draws on phylogenetic approaches that have been successfully developed for biological evolution. The technique and process provide an insight into the lineage, pace and impact of external conditions on the evolution of risks. They also provide a unique and rational classification of risk in an enterprise that can be used to optimize risk management resources. An example of a fictitious insurance company is used to illustrate the approach. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: The paper argues that Risks Evaluation at its core is a psychological process that can lead to the special type of chaos described in modern Chaos Theory. It will argue that quantification and scientific modeling does not exempt risk assessment from the potential for deep biases. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: A new reason for the inherent instability of the insurance business can be found in the literature of anthropology. The theory of plural rationalities, also known as Cultural Theory of Risk or simply Cultural Theory, posits that the world is populated by people with four fundamentally different attitudes toward risk. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

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.

Description: In this Chapter we present a novel way for estimating aggregated EC figures based on Bayesian copula estimation. Contrary to the classic approach of using a single inter-risk- correlation matrix we derive a probability distribution of possible correlation matrices that enables us to tackle the important issue of parameter uncertainty. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Delinquency rates are closely related to the economic conditions and can be analyzed using measures of economic growth and stability. In an attempt to predict the delinquency rate for the health care equipment financial industry, we investigated the relationship between delinquency rate and key macroeconomic variables for the period from 1998 to 2008. The study reveals that the tightening credit standards and unemployment rate are the key macroeconomic indicators influencing the delinquency rate. The analysis further helps in arriving at a trigger to monitor the delinquency rate based on the macroeconomic indicators, thus enabling proactive portfolio management. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Report of findings for Society of Actuaries research project on the financial reporting for insurance contracts under possible future international accounting standards. This project studies the modeling of Certain Life and Health Insurance and Annuity Products Offered by U.S. and Other Insurers for the Purpose of Measurement of Liabilities under the International Accounting Standards Board’s Exposure Draft on Insurance Contracts and U.S. GAAP

Description: This is an in-depth look at the root causes of the subprime mortgage crisis and ways actuaries can eliminate the problems. From the Actuary Magazine, April/May 2010 – Volume 7 Issue 2.

Description: Discussion of China’s reinsurance industry.

Description: The aim of this work is the definition of a holistic approach to assess the maturity level of ERM within an organization, following the principles defined by The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission 2004b in the “Enterprise Risk Management—Integrated Framework.”

Description: This paper discusses both the theoretical and the application aspects of stress testing in managing enterprise risks. Effective stress testing maximizes the risk adjusted enterprise profit by controlling major risks financial, strategic, operational and hazard upon identifying risk metrics and modeling the correlations. A case study is included for demonstration purposes.

Description: Fraud is often a dynamic and challenging problem in credit card lending business. Supervised modeling/segmentation techniques are commonly used in fraud detection to distinguish risky transactions from non-risky transactions. However, these techniques frequently rely on identifying risky behavior at a global level. In this paper, along with the classical approach, a new technique has been studied to improve the behavioral fraud detection capability. The application of this proposed technique enables us to identify risky behavior at the account level.

Description: The paper focuses on value creation for European health insurance companies through the practical application of integrated ERM frameworks.

Description: This is a concluding and encompassing part of our research on the project entitled \Weighted Premium Calculation Principles and Risk Capital Allocations, which has been supported by the Actuarial Education and Research Fund AERF and the Society of Actuaries Committee on Knowledge Extension Research CKER. We explore the concept of weighted distributions and their role in various phenomena occurring in insurance and finance. In particular, we relate weighted distributions to actuarial and economic premium calculation principles, and also to the capital asset pricing model CAPM. Imitating the latter, we propose a weighted insurance pricing model WIPM. Although general in formulation, we show that the WIPM can successfully be evaluated in a variety of situations, which we illustrate with a number of examples.

Description: Property and casualty insurers face risks in many key areas, such as operations, natural catastrophes and underwriting. Among the underwriting risks is the potential financial impact of adverse loss reserves development.This paper illustrates a model of loss reserve risk that will incorporate how risk evolves over time at annual time horizons.

Description: This article sees enterprise risk management as a specific application of knowledge in Order to control deviations from strategic objectives, shareholders’ values and stakeholders’ relationships. Before and after a modeling process it is necessary to find insights into how the application of knowledge management processes can improve the understanding of risk and the implementation of enterprise risk management. The article presents a proposed methodology to contribute to providing a guide for developing risk modeling knowledge and a reduction of knowledge silos, in order to improve the quality and quantity of solutions related to risk inquiries across the organization.

Description: The author will show that risk management is more than combining several processes and methods it is much more a company wide approach that enables an open dealing with chances and risks, requiring a change in culture, governance and decision rules across the whole organizations.

Description: In the copula literature there are many bivariate distribution families but very few higher dimensional ones. Moreover, most of these are difficult to work with. Some of the bivariate families can be extended to more dimensions but in general the construction of distribution functions with more than two variables is a difficult problem. This paper introduces a construction method that is straightforward to implement and can produce multivariate distribution functions of any dimension.

Description: This article discusses the current status of the statutory move towards principle-based reserves, including implications for small insurance companies, noting that the outcome is certainly unclear.

Description: This paper develops credibility using a longitudinal data framework. In a longitudinal data framework, one might encounter data from a cross-section of risk classes towns with a history of insurance claims available for each risk class. For the marginal claims distributions, we use generalized linear models, an extension of linear regression that also encompasses Weibull and Gamma regressions. Copulas are used to model the dependencies over time specifically, this paper is the first to propose using a t-copula in the context of generalized linear models. The t-copula is the copula associated with the multivariate t-distribution like univariate t-distributions, it seems especially suitable for empirical work. Moreover, we show that the t-copula gives rise to easily computable predictive distributions that we use to generate credibility predictors. Like Bayesian methods, our copula credibility prediction methods allow us to provide an entire distribution of predicted claims, not just a point prediction.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society CAS and the Society of Actuaries SOA, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research.

Description: This paper examines some new Bayesian models for loss reserving inspired by a consideration of some of the methods and techniques appearing in the traditional chain ladder literature. This includes a possibly order restricted hierarchical Bayesian model for the year over year development factors. The issues of reserve variability and ranges of reasonable reserve estimates are considered. A new Bornhuetter-Ferguson styled Bayesian method of estimate revision is also discussed. These Bayesian models can be implemented using Markov chain Monte Carlo MCMC methods in a variety of programming languages, and can serve as starting points for more advanced models. This paper describes their implementation in WinBUGS a specialized software program for MCMC simulations. Illustrative WinBUGS code is included.

Description: This 2008 article discusses the current status of the statutory principle-based approach PBA to reserves and capital, including risk based capital RBC, federal income tax implications, and other topics, noting that the project is “still a work in process.”

Description: Enterprise risk management ERM is for the measurement and the management of all significant risks of the business holistically irrespective of types and sources. The study offers significant advances in the current debate on the performance of enterprise risk management, in particular, minimizing the existing gap between the academic understanding and practitioners’ experience on the topic.

Description: This paper investigates the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risk type, which can be thought of as market risk. We analytically calculate their inter-risk correlation and show how inter-risk correlation bounds can be derived.

Description: This paper examines the fundamental principles underlying the theory of rate change. The proposed approach shows improved accuracy as compared to current methods, with particular significance for a non-static book of business.

Description: Author discusses the treatment of current life insurance reserves under the tax code in determining a life insurer's taxable income, and what challenges are ahead in the era of principles-based reserves.

Description: Appendix to the Critical Review of Stochastic Simulation Literature and Applications for Health Actuaries. The Development of a Simulation Model of Primary Prevention Strategies for Coronary Heart Disease

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: ongoing discussion of the proper interest rate to use in discounting liability cash flows to reflect credit risk of the insurer in a fair value accounting system

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This paper proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.

Description: The SOA’s Committee on Finance Research recently made available the results of a research study that explores economic series and provides an Excel-based tool for generating future economic scenarios. From Risks and Rewards Newsletter, August 2005, Issue No. 47.

Description: Are Your Scenarios on Target?From Risks and Rewards Newsletter, August 2005, Issue No. 47. Actuaries are faced with the dilemma of how to incorporate advances in insurance products and modeling technology into their work. Increasingly, this means looking at a large number of potential outcomes using stochastic simulations.

Description: This paper explores the range of contribution policies allowable under various sets of rules, and then proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.