Description: Insurance company financial reporting and performance measurement are going through a significant transformation. Insurers are beginning to look at their business based on what many refer to as the “economic value framework.” Under this framework insurance companies determine the economic value of the capital invested in their business and the economic value of earnings to derive a risk-adjusted return on capital. Standard setters, primarily European insurance regulators through Solvency II and the International Accounting Standards Board through IFRS Phase II, propose adopting many of these concepts for solvency and performance reporting.

Description: The paper explores developments through 2006 in the application of market-consistent concepts to the measurement of fair values of liabilities for financial reporting purposes.

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 paper introduces basic embedded value EV principles, concepts and formulas that will be especially valuable to the beginning students of EV.

Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

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

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 considers the problem of actuaries acting as advisers to individuals. This activity is covered by regulations, discussed in the paper, that currently recognize other professions but not actuaries. The paper recommends that actuarial organizations lobby the relevant legislative and regulatory bodies to provide actuaries pursuing an investment-focused career path with the same exemption status as other professionals.