Description: This article analyzes the events leading to low interest rates and recommends careful asset/liability management and risk analysis to address future challenges with interest rates.

Description: From a session at the Health/Pension Spring Meeting held in New Orleans, Louisiana June 15-17, 2005 Panelists discussed some of the research behind understanding decision-making and how this type of research can be used to enhance the modeling of consumer choice. Discussion of the field of behavioral economics and its potential application in improving assumptions for modeling health care purchasing.

Description: This e-book contains topical essays that express the opinions and thoughts of a number of authors on the subject. It should be understood that the thoughts and insights shared herein are the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the Casualty Actuarial Society, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, or corresponding employers of the essayists.

Description: The paper o ers a simple framework for ranking the common reinsurance struc- tures in practice with the theory of stochastic orders. The basic idea is to slice the space of reinsurance structures into groups by expected loss cost to facilitate the comparisons within the group and between groups. Given the standard risk aversion assumption in economics, a spectrum of reinsurance structures with the same expected loss cost can be compared analytically with one another and sequenced based on their risk coverages under the convex order. The paper then expands the dimension of the comparison to groups of reinsurance structures with di erent expected loss costs, which can be ranked under the increasing convex order and the usual stochastic order. As such, the paper maps out the ordering for the entire space of reinsurance structures and presents it in a ma- trix format for quick reference. The implication of this stochastic ordering to reinsurance pricing is also investigated.

Description: Many risk management decisions involve the timing of implementing risk strategies. The cost of hedging, capital raising and securitization changes with the economic environment. The timing of de-risking and investment in new risk management functions affect the cost and benefit of these projects as well. Like investment timing, it is important to consider the timing in risk management decisions to maximize the gain of risk management projects. This paper discusses methods of determining the appropriate timing of implementing a risk management strategy or investing in risk management projects. It explains the human biases that may lead to inferior timing decisions. It also covers the costs and benefits of risk management projects and the impact of new information on the decision-making process. Timing considerations for financial risk hedging, insurance risk hedging and investment in new risk management projects are explained. Factors used for timing decisions include economic conditions, market volatility, credit rating, borrowing cost, capital adequacy and financial resources.

Description: This is the abstract for the paper, The Boomers Are Coming: A Total Cost of Care Model of the Impact of Population Aging on the Cost of Chronic and Acute Conditions in the United States. The complete paper is not available online.

Description: Chapter 3 analyzes, in table form, the study's claimant counts and charge totals, broken down by plan design type, gender, age, year, and by subscriber vs. dependent. From Group Medical Insurance Large Claims Database Collection and Analysis, M-HB97-1.