Description: This article discusses the details of what happened in equity repo in 2013.

Description: The recent financial crisis created incentives to review investment practices and see what was done well and what could be improved for the future. Looking inward at insurer investment practices, background trend information was generated and a survey developed for insurers to share their thoughts. The research continued with conversations in private and public forums, where initial conclusions were expanded.

Description: This report studies the various benchmarks for analyzing the option-adjusted spreads of the major fixed income asset classes of life insurance companies. In addition, this report analyzes the historical benchmark performance against default rates for the asset class being benchmarked.

Description: Financial illiteracy has been identified as a major obstacle to effective retirement planning for Americans. Anna Rappaport’s article provides actuaries with helpful ideas about ways to make the public more aware of the increasing need for financial literacy and some of the resources currently available to help individuals.

Description: The 1986-98 Credit Risk Loss Experience Study represents a continuation of the 1986-94 study analyzing credit loss experience by institutional investors on private placement bonds. The study measures incidence rates, loss severities and economic loss rates associated with credit risk events for privately placed debt during the years 1986-98.

Description: This presentation considers the pricing of European derivatives in a Black-Scholes model with stochastic volatility. The presentation shows how Parseval’s theorem may be used to express those prices as Fourier integrals. This is a significant improvement over Monte Carlo simulation in many cases. The main ingredient in this presentation's method is the Laplace transform of the ordinary [constant volatility] price of a put or call in the Black-Scholes model, where the transform is taken with respect to maturity [T]. The presentation derives these formulas and then applies them to the case where volatility is modelled as a Markov chain in continuous time, the so-called 'Markov regime switching model'. This model has been used previously in stochastic volatility modelling, but mostly with only N=2 states. The presentation shows how to use N=3 states without difficulty, and how larger number of states can be handled. Numerical illustrations are given, including the volatility smile in a three-state model.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that reverses the sequence of the Euler (or gradient) allocation technique by calculating the marginal costs of risk exposures for a profit maximizing financial institution with risk averse counterparties, and then identifying a closed-form solution for the risk measure whose gradient delivers the correct marginal costs.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that uses delay equations to derive a formula for the price of an option used for the pricing of corporate debt and adopts this approach to the valuation of government loan guarantees for companies in financial distress.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that proposes a new model for the loss given default (LGD), which takes the depth of default into consideration.

Description: This presentation revisits Tilley’s approach to approximating the value of a derivative through simulation and compares it to the Least Squares Monte Carlo Method developed by Longstaff and Schwartz.