Description: Presented at September 1994 Valuation Actuary Symposium. Discusses analyzing and projecting financial risk in group health plans.

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: “Investments in securities are traditionally evaluated on a standalone basis by using ratios that summarize the relation¬ship between anticipated risks and rewards. These ratios could also be used to better quantify the relationship between the standalone risks and rewards of life and annuity products and thus enhance the capital allocation process. These ratios will be discussed and critiqued.” The article describes how “the . . . ratios can help tie modeled product risks to modeled rewards.”

Description: This article reviews the sixth survey of Emerging Risks, sponsored by the Joint Risk Management Section and completed in fall 2012.

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 academy generator is widely applied in actuarial practice. Initially confined to regulatory reserving, companies are increasingly using the AAA/SOA generator over an ever widening range of applications testing the limits of the academy generator's intended function. The session will give a brief overview of the academy generator and the asset classes it can be used to model. It will also analyze the statistical properties of the academy scenarios and discuss the scenarios relative to standard validation criterion. Some of the challenges that actuaries face in using this framework will be reviewed and options for addressing these challenges will be offered.

Description: Panelists discuss the importance of credit-worthiness to the customer of an insurance company, a brief history and description of the Standard & Poor's and Moody's rating systems, the efforts an insurance company goes through in obtaining ratings by outside agencies, the efforts required to maintain the ratings, and the importance of the ratings to the insurance company. From the 1987 Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 13, No. 3.

Description: Applications of Stress Testing

Description: Essays advocating for incentive compensation linked to the level of risk in an organization.

Description: The adoption of FAS 158 forces sponsors of post-employment health benefit plans to consider how to manage the volatility that changes in medical care inflation create in the other postemployment benefits (OPEB) liability. By choosing carefully how the nominal discount rate used for the liability is decomposed into real rates and inflation, I illustrate that the true exposure to an OPEB plan is to the spread of medical care inflation above (or below) the overall inflation rate. The implication is that an effective immunization strategy exists that can eliminate most of the volatility in the OPEB account.