Description: Why Write Variable Products When You Can Put the Money Directly into the Stock Market?

Description: Summary of research project designed to document method to credit interest rates to account value based products. The investment year method (IYM) can theoretically align with investment strategy and be fair to policyholders. These products were designed in the 1980s with guaranteed nominal rates above what is currently accessible so most products credit the guaranteed rate. This paper documents how it could be resurrected during the next interest rate cycle.

Description: Decomposes guaranteed minimum maturity benefit option into a basket of components, and values each component with both a Black-Scholes model and a regime-switching GARCH model. Performs sensitivity analysis on dynamic lapse assumption.

Description: Feature article discussing the variable annuity industry rebuilding and reinventing itself.

Description: This article explores the effectiveness of hedging delta and rho of equity options. This provides insight into the frequency and severity of losses due to not hedging volatility risk or other higher order risks. 10yr-equity put option strategies were chosen to represent the risk of hedging guaranteed benefits attached to variable annuities, while 1-yr put and call strategies were modeled to investigate the risk of hedging equity index interest credited to fixed indexed annuities. In both cases, the value of the option was compared to the value of delta/rho hedges in the tail of both actual historical and simulated scenarios for equity returns and volatilities. The historical path of interest rates and equities was generally used to highlight the hedge impact for different implied volatility assumptions in each example.

Description: Derives appropriate hedge ratios for CPPI strategies, taking into account discrete hedge times and market dislocations (gap risk).

Description: This article examines how the choice of the rebalancing frequency in a variable annuity hedging program impacts hedging.

Description: The article describes the 2017 Redington Prize-winning paper "Lapse-and-Reentry in Variable Annuities", by Thorsten Moenig and Nan Zhu, FSA.

Description: How to set asset assumption, at the cycle or through the cycle and other considerations

Description: This article is a call for work that has been done in stochastic modeling and papers in the area of of stochastic modeling of investment returns in respect of the maturity and mortality guarantees offered on segregated fund and variable annuity products. These will be used in the symposium on stochastic modeling in September 1999 sponsored by the CIA, SOA and Actuarial Foundation.