Description: Letter From The President column for the October/November 2012 edition of The Actuary magazine discussing the importance of actuaries staying relevant in today’s and the future’s work force.

Description: Applications of Stress Testing

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: Global financial crises like the one recently experienced, affected both large and small institutions.Today, when there is heightened need for enhanced risk management tools, some entities are unable to employ sophisticated mechanisms due to limited data availability. Moreover, from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s point of view via Basel II and Basel III, the internal ratings- based (IRB) approach requires that institutions have some reliable estimates of default probabilities of default for each rating grade. Taking the work of previous researches a step further, this paper intends to propose a new dynamic mechanism to for the risk management industry for to calculateing probabilities of default (PD). Through these estimates for the core model, we generate implied probability of default (PD) through actuarial estimation tools and different probability distributions. This mechanism is specialized to work best for low- defa ult portfolios (LDPs). Furthermore, scenario testing is adopted to validate the model against any model- specific bias

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: Stress tests and scenarios are often used as an informative tool to help stakeholders understand the risk profile of a firm. These analyses are often informational only and not directly linked to internal decision-making. This paper describes our approach to integrating stress tests into a regular decision-making process as part of our Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA). We have implemented a framework and analytical process that both enhances management’s understanding of our risk profile and links that to the development of our risk appetite. In this applied paper, we describe the framework and supporting analytics we established to achieve this goal and the practical implications for obtaining buy-in from senior management to establish this as an ongoing process.

Description: Finding appealing return on equity for low margin or high risk weighted asset business by dealers has been challenging. Because of this, trading assets have fallen substantially especially in rates and corporate trading books. Smaller books suggest challenged liquidity as balance sheets become less elastic.

Description: This paper presents a method of testing second-order stochastic dominance of risks. This methodology allows risks to be partially ordered by value with available data - requiring only that the risks have yields distributed as one of the location-scale family of distributions and that the actuary can specify that family.

Description: The selection of the economic capital calculation approach becomes more of a modeling decision. Now let us pause here and think about the arbitrage-free assumption at the beginning. At any time, there can be only one price on any asset. If the company considers the price calculated above as the fair price for its products, then it must hold true that the same price has to be arrived at if the company uses a real-world pricing approach instead of a risk-neutral approach. This gives us a very good basis to calibrate the appro- priate economic capital.

Description: Article is a detailed discussion of the Risk Management and Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (RMORSA) Model Act that was recently approved by the NAIC and is being adopted by legislatures across the country.