Description: In developing the economic assumptions for use in an appraisal, a team approach must be used. The investment bankers, external actuaries, and the company's financial area research current and historic economic conditions to develop an internally consistent base scenario. To be successful all parties must be comfortable with this scenario and its implications on production, investment yields, and, ultimately, distributable earnings. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: One of the primary goals of the actuarial appraisal is to provide enough information for potential investors to make informed judgments as to the potential value of a property. From Actuarial Considerations in Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions, M-FI03-1.

Description: Actuaries measure, model, and manage risks. Risk associated with the investment function is a major uncertainty faced by many insurance companies. Actuaries should have knowledge of the asset side of the balance sheet of an insurance company and how it relates to the liability side. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: View The Impact of Disaster Events on Investments – Contagion Channels Perspective.

Description: Discusses the optimal consumption strategy in the presence of default risk. It highlights the Regime-Switching model, which indicates that the market situation may change and the distribution of an asset's return will change over time.

Description: This paper investigates the implications of using the Basel II motivated Advanced Measurement Approaches as a method to assess operational risk capital charges for banks and insurance companies with regard to U.S. regulations. The AMA developed in the paper uses actuarial loss models complemented by the extreme value theory to determine the empirical probability distribution function of the aggregated capital charges in the context of various classes of copulas. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2006.

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks (CPRNR) commissioned Linda Koco to write this guide that employers can use when considering advice options for a company retirement plan. The guide includes information about the nature and timing of decisions, ongoing decisions after retirement, and advice considerations. The guide is intended to be unbiased toward any particular approach or organization’s product. This guide does not provide advice for specific situations and should not be construed as doing so. It is an information tool for considerations related to advice. The guide is not intended to provide legal guidance or recommendations.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: Table from an article from The Actuary Magazine entitled Outsourcing of General Account Investments.