Description: The underlying premise of this paper is that enterprise risk management (ERM), as it continues to evolve as both a process and a collection of risk management techniques, can benefit from several different (but ultimately somewhat related) “megatrends.” The core of this paper concentrates on the impact on ERM of one of those megatrends: the emergence of a behavioral economics perspective, which is beginning to have a large impact on our understanding of the economy and on certain economic and business processes. The evolution and context of behavioral economics are described, and potential implications for the practice of ERM are discussed. The paper culminates with a variety of specific suggestions for ERM practice in response to findings from behavioral economics research, specifically a number of human cognitive dissonances inconsistent with traditional economic theory.

Description: Reinsurance reduces the required capital of the primary insurer but increases that of the reinsurer. Capital is costly. All capital costs, including that of the insurer and the reinsurer, are ultimately borne by primary policyholders. Reducing the total capital of insurers and reinsurers brings down the total capital cost and the total primary policy premium. A reinsurance arrangement is considered optimal—if it minimizes the total required capital. This optimal reinsurance is an attracting equilibrium under price competition. Evidence suggests an inverse relationship between the total required capital and the correlation between the losses held by different insurers and reinsurers. Examples are constructed to examine this and other properties of the optimal reinsurance.

Description: When companies engage in risk management activities, they can be seen as modifying their distributions of future outcomes. Often, this takes the form of trading off a sure cost for a decrease in some potential risk of loss. Companies may carry out these activities with several goals in mind, such as reduction in earnings volatility or preservation of capital. This paper will demonstrate a method for evaluating possible strategies by dividing the effects on costs and risks into three tranches: earnings, impact and estate. The tranches can be associated with different interests of the various stakeholders. This trifurcation analysis can help to explain the risk-reward trade-offs of different risk treatment alternatives and can aid in risk-related decisionmaking.

Description: Obsolescence of physical assets and processes is a major component of operational risk for some companies. A simulation experiment shows that managers, who consider the retirement and replacement of individual assets in isolation, have rational incentives, due to risk aversion and uncertainty, to defer the replacement of assets past a time that is optimal from the perspective of the shareholder who owns the entire portfolio of such assets. This results in measurable wealth destruction, —and a demonstrable opportunity to significantly enhance a company’s value. A practical decision model for the replacement timing of fixed, physical assets, which creates wealth by minimizing the long-term consumption of scarce resources, is provided.

Description: Increased attention was paid to regulatory capital with the global financial crisis in 2008. Whilst companies may not have the incentives to retain a large amount of capital in the absence of regulatory capital requirements, overcapitalized entities can have drawback such as its impact on competitiveness. There are other weaknesses in the regulatory capital model such as its limitation in facilitating risk-based decisions as regulatory capital does not necessarily reflect the economic reality and risks an entity faces. Nonetheless, there are ways for regulators and/or companies to handle the weaknesses in the regulatory capital model. For instance, granularity can be introduced in determining regulatory capital. Economic capital can be used to encourage entities to implement risk management controls and facilitate risk-based business decisions (e.g., risk-adjusted performance assessment and risk-based capital allocation). Ultimately, hav ing effective risk management and risk-based capital determination are ways to prevent company failures and bankruptcies.

Description: The U.K. Pension Protection Fund (PPF) was established in April 2005 to protect the pensions of members of U.K. private sector defined benefit pension schemes that have insufficient assets and whose corporate sponsor fails. The fund takes over the pension scheme assets and assumes responsibility for the payment of compensation to the former members of the scheme. PPF is funded by a levy on the population of eligible schemes. The elements of the enterprise risk management of the fund have been developed by reference to practice within proprietary insurance institutions and other pensions funds; their application to this unique financial vehicle is the subject of this paper. The paper draws on references to relevant risk and actuarial work. It is designed to illustrate the application of principles and techniques to a real world example.

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: This paper demonstrates the use of Quantile Regression in the development and understanding of conditional value at risk (VaR) models for enterprise risk management.