Description: The paper takes a critical stand on best ERM practices as proposed by the Cultural Theory of Risk and especially by the work of Ingram, Underwood and Thompson (IUT). The paper claims that both mainstream-type ERM practices ("rigid ERM") and IUT's alternative ("fluid ERM") fail in critical parts to account how risk managers, in everyday normal tasks, develop their ERM practices in a context-dependent way. Context-dependent ERM takes into account the whole context, that is both the recognition that risk environment changes and the need for the firm to develop a stable (yet open to meaningful changes) sociotechnical identity with a consistent risk attitude and appetite.

Description: Operational risk is likely one of the most significant risks faced by an organization. This article defines operational risk and how a company or organization can effectively manage this risk, including types of management tools, metrics and measurement, and governance, risk, and compliance compliance (GRC) systems.

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This is the abstract of a paper that proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.

Description: Abstract for the 2009 Housing Wealth monograph paper, “Retirement Implications of Housing Wealth Spending”. This paper explores comparative trends in home ownership versus renters, the associated levels of housing expenditures, and the extent of equity borrowing. The goal is to stress the need in retirement to cover basic housing needs and the risks of using housing for other purposes.

Description: This paper discusses the key forces likely to influence U.K. mortality in the 21st century, and describes the methodology and assumptions used in the latest projections of U.K. mortality. The paper also describes recent tables of mortality rates published by the Continuous Mortality Investigation, based on the experience of people taking out insurance contracts and the approaches taken to projecting these.

Description: We propose an age-shift model to modify the LC model and deal with the problem of parameters. The proposed method attains smaller estimation errors with respect to mean absolute percentage error or mean square error. We also apply the proposed age-shift model to the mortality rates of these four countries to evaluate the longevity risk in annuity products by measuring life expectancy.

Description: The editor discusses the importance of purchasing a long-term care insurance policy. He also presents highlights of the articles contained in the issue.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that investigates the effect of ambiguity on the market for insurance when preferences are ordered by comparison of Choquet expected utilities.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that shows that life expectancy at birth for populations closed to migration with at least two successive census counts of the population by age can be computed by using cohort change ratios in combination with an identity whereby the radix of a life table is equal to 1.

Description: This abstract describes a presentation that provides an update on the education activities of the Society of Actuaries.