Description: Article is a detailed discussion of the Risk Management and Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (RMORSA) Model Act that was recently approved by the NAIC and is being adopted by legislatures across the country.

Description: This is a study on the Nesbitt formula and the variants to this formula.

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: The impact of Fed’s QE program on the financial markets has been enormous and profound. The tapering and the eventual removal of the stimulus will be equally enormous and profound, and may be disruptive. To adapt to the potential regime change in near future, some investment strategies have been proposed: (1) shorten duration to focus on the short end of the yield curve and create laddered portfolios; (2) reduce allocation to high yield bonds; (3) rotate out interest rate sensitive sectors such as utilities; and (4) use interest rate derivatives to hedge the interest rate uncertainties lying ahead. On the other hand, contrarians who see the QE program continuing may stay the course and consider (1) adding duration, (2) gaining exposure to high yield bonds, and (3) increasing allocation to utilities and telecoms.

Description: From the Editor: This issue of Long-Term Care News attempts to address how LTC insurers manage investment risk and morbidity misestimation risks.

Description: A discussion of the possible effort required and impacts resulting from the implementation of C3 Phase II for establishing risk-based capital for variable annuities. This article will describe practical considerations gleaned from actual valuation calculations recently performed by a consulting firm.

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

Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: Part one of a two-part article, to be contined in Feb 2014. Provides useful rules of thumb for breaking out investment return into components of periodic arithmetic return, geometric return, the volatility of returns and the correlation of returns by asset class. Develops and relates these axiomatic concepts into rules of thumb for estimating quantiles of a range of stochastic returns.