Description: ongoing discussion of the proper interest rate to use in discounting liability cash flows to reflect credit risk of the insurer in a fair value accounting system

Description: Discusses how a small health insurance company may be able to create and successfully maintain its wealth through careful actuarial model considerations used in calculating reserves. A traditional and a conservative approach to calculating the reserves are compared. The conservative approach was found particularly useful when estimating reserves for an individual health insurance company with numerous product lines each relatively small in volume.

Description: Since insurance contract liabilities are uncertain in amount, an estimate is required. And under most accounting frameworks, the estimate of an uncertain amount should contain some sort of margin for uncertainty. This paper provides a mathematical connection between that margin and the market price of risk as measured by the cost of capital. The connection makes use of the theory of utility and an exponential utility curve.

Description: The five words for ERM are transparency, discipline, alignment, adaptability and resilience. This article focuses on transparency, discipline and resilience.

Description: This paper illustrates a current approach to capital allocation, referred to herein as Tail Contribution Analysis TCA, using it to evaluate the impact of changes in an insurer’s operations by allocating capital to individual lines of business. It then highlights a common problem in the implementation of the procedure arising from reserve volatility and briefly notes the failure of the methodology to account for a firm’s changing levels of risk under various strategies. Finally, it introduces an alternative method for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. We will discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, we will illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: Summarizes the Section's sponsored 2011 Annual Meeting sessions: business meeting, receptions and 3 programs - 'IFRS: The Future of Accounting for Insurance and its Implications', 'Where Enterprise Risk Management Meets Capital Management' and 'Managing Longevity and Mortality Risks and their Global Activities', plus some non-technical sessions on successful retirement.

Description: Risk management and capital budgeting are two critical components of the corporate decision process. They often need to be considered jointly at the corporate level because of their natural interaction through the dependent risk exposures and other synergetic relationships within an intricate corporate structure in a dynamic business environment. . This paper develops an integrated framework that aligns these two important corporate strategies across business divisions to optimize the streamlined enterprise strategic goal in a multi-period setting. The proposed integrated framework can serve as a practical guideline for corporate executives to optimally coordinate capital budgeting and risk management at the enterprise level.

Description: Highlight of the ERM Symposium