Description: Summarizes a research paper considering insurer performance during the financial crisis, with actions and circumstances that improved results highlighted.

Description: This article discusses the coming opportunities for insurance companies in the retirement market, particularly with respect to annuities.

Description: Discusses the use of ERM in the world of small insurance companies.

Description: This articles educates the reader on Mortgage-Backed Securities. It highlights the value of this asset class and also a few of the challenges.

Description: Metadata for entire issue

Description: For establishing the ongoing adequacy of claim reserves for blocks of long-term care insurance, retro testing is a blunt tool, the results of which are not conclusive. Claim reserve retro tests should be reviewed by claim duration, include the impact of interest consistently, and include updated assumptions that can have an impact on claim termination rates or other factors. The new NAIC LTC Experience Reporting Forms estimated to arrive for reporting year 2008 will help modernize LTCI retro tests, providing additional accuracy and standardization. Actuaries should not wait for these forms, but rather ensure that any claim reserve analysis moves beyond a basic calendar year retro test.

Description: A dicussion of the Rate Classification Actuarial Standard of Practice, ASOP #12: its purpose, its scope, guidance, and examples.

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: Provides the actuary with a more satisfactory basis for annuity premiums and reserves. It presents a new mortality basis and offers a description of its construction. It also provides a historical review of past mortality tables for annuities. From the Society of Actuaries 50th Anniversary Monograph, M-AV99-1.

Description: The ORSA should be more than a compliance requirement -- its process should be an integral element of a company's governance and risk and strategic planning process used by both management and the board on a regular feedback loop basis. Similar to that used for ERM, it along with a carefully constructed set of metrics should serve as the springboard to be used to identify, control and mitigate short- and long-term risks, as well as to enable exploitation of opportunities to add shareholder and policyholder value. Risk can represent an opportunity from which insurers can leverage their knowledge and risk management capabilities to find and maintain a competitive edge. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"