Description: Financial economics is the discipline underlying all financial services. No matter what your area of specialty or your role in your organization, an understanding of financial economics is essential. As you will learn in this module, financial economics is the study of how individuals and institutions acquire, save, and invest money. These activities are fundamental to institutions and individuals. Thus, not only will this module help you be a more knowledgeable actuary, it will also help you with your personal financial planning.

Description: This SOA e-course shows you how to use financial modeling to assess or mitigate risk. It covers derivatives pricing, range of outcomes and more.

Description: In this paper, the authors take an axiomatic approach to characterize insurance prices in a competitive market setting. Four axioms are presented to describe the behavior of market insurance prices. From these axioms it follows that the price of an insurance risk has a Choquet integral representation with respect to a distorted probability.

Description: Presented at May 2005 Spring Meeting. This session examines financial, economic and traditional actuarial methodological approaches used for solving investment-risk problems.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that investigates the effect of ambiguity on the market for insurance when preferences are ordered by comparison of Choquet expected utilities.

Description: Risk management techniques do not include system science. System science requires that the uncertainty of the world is incorporated into the results. The articles explains the difference between risk and uncertainty. Learn how risk practices create an overoptimistic view of future outcomes.

Description: This article discusses equity risk premium, what it is, how it should be measured, if a constant risk premium provides the best model and what are reasonable expectations for the future.

Description: Risk management techniques do not include system science. System science requires that the uncertainty of the world is incorporated into the results. The articles explains the difference between risk and uncertainty. Learn how risk practices create an overoptimistic view of future outcomes.

Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: This article addresses the difficulties of risk modeling in a poor economic environment. The problems include imperfect vendors of data, facing events that have never occurred before, unpredictable consumer behavior, conflicting data sources, and AAA credit doesn't always mean AAA.