Description: This is the full version of Expanding Horizons, July 1998, Issue No. 18.

Description: A checklist for treaty preparations and review of a standard life Reinsurance Agreement. This document covers the purpose of each provision, the common elements, common variations and problems that may arise.

Description: Recurrence relations arise naturally in life contingencies for 2 reasons - the aggregate law of mortality, which relates the distribution of the future life times of 2 insureds, if one of them and the other is that most life insurance products can be constructed as a portfolio of 2 basic product types. We use the above simple idea and the extra freedom provided by the fractional age distribution to reveal a structure behind some common recursions. The structure has obvious pedagogical value. More interestingly, a software based on it has been implemented which facilitates actuarial computing.

Description: In this note, the asymptotic behavior of the probability of ruin is derived by means of infinitesimal generators and Laplace transforms. Using these same tools, it is shown that the probability of ruin has an algebraic decay rate if the insurance company invests its capital in a risky asset with a price which follows a geometric Brownian motion. The latter result is shown to be valid not only for exponentially distributed claim amounts, as in Frolova et al. 2002, but, more generally, for any claim amount distribution that has a moment generating function defined in a neighborhood of the origin.

Description: Recently, there has been growing interest among insurance and investment experts to focus on the use of a tail conditional expectation as a measure of risk, since it shares properties that are considered desirable and applicable in a variety of situations. This paper examines above risk measure in the case of a multivariate gamma portfolio. We demonstrate the explicit formulas for tail conditional expectation and based on it capital allocation when the proposed multivariate model consists of dependent and independent gamma marginals

Description: In this paper, we illustrate how to value American-style options using the Least-Squares Monte Carlo LSM approach proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz 2001 and investigate whether there exists an optimal regression complexity in the LSM framework for options pricing. In particular, we use the smoothing spline in the regression step, which allows us to control the regression complexity on a continuous scale with just one tuning parameter. Numerical results on American put options indicate that we need to use more than a linear regression, but as the regression becomes more complex, the accuracy of the LSM method quickly deteriorates. From 39th Actuarial Research Conference.

Description: This paper examines claim transaction data as experienced in the Canadian pet insurance industry. The current practice is to use an exposure unit approach to estimate the pure premium cost. This approach is applied in this paper in order to reveal certain cost patterns in accident, illness and death benefit costs.

Description: This paper investigates the optimal multi-period proportional reinsurance strategy that minimizes the ruin probability of an insurer. Some conditions under which it is optimal to have no reinsurance are derived. Based on these results, a new concept, capital threshold of proportional reinsurance, is introduced. In the case of two periods, a lower bound of the capital threshold of proportional reinsurance is provided. Some economic implications and properties of this new concept are also discussed.

Description: This article addresses a specific PGAAP issue companies have faced recently in implementing PGAAP, specifically, whether it is appropriate, under current purchase accounting guidance, to defer heaped renewal commissions. From Society of Actuaries Financial Reporting Monograph, M-AS99-1.

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.