Description: discussion of risk management and proper pricing of life insurance products.

Description: Derives appropriate hedge ratios for CPPI strategies, taking into account discrete hedge times and market dislocations (gap risk).

Description: This paper presents a methodology of pricing the guaranteed minimum death benefit of a variable annuity in a market model with jumps. Recent developments in the stock market make variable annuities very attractive products from the insured point of view, but less attractive for insurers. The insured still has the possibility of investment benefits, while avoiding the risk of a stock market collapse. The insurer wants to minimize its risk and yet sell a competitive product. The financial market model consists of one riskless asset and one risky asset whose price jumps in proportions J at some random times T which correspond to the jump times of a Poisson process. The model describes incomplete markets and there is no perfect hedging. In the second part of the paper, we describe a possible method of risk analysis for binomial tree models.

Description: This paper develops credibility using a longitudinal data framework. In a longitudinal data framework, one might encounter data from a cross-section of risk classes towns with a history of insurance claims available for each risk class. For the marginal claims distributions, we use generalized linear models, an extension of linear regression that also encompasses Weibull and Gamma regressions. Copulas are used to model the dependencies over time specifically, this paper is the first to propose using a t-copula in the context of generalized linear models. The t-copula is the copula associated with the multivariate t-distribution like univariate t-distributions, it seems especially suitable for empirical work. Moreover, we show that the t-copula gives rise to easily computable predictive distributions that we use to generate credibility predictors. Like Bayesian methods, our copula credibility prediction methods allow us to provide an entire distribution of predicted claims, not just a point prediction.

Description: Investment Fallacies: The Best Model Doesn't Win

Description: Investment Fallacies: The "Dollar Bill" Fallacy

Description: Feature article describing what makes a company a systemically important financial institution and the new rules those companies will have to follow.

Description: Letter From The President column for the October/November 2012 edition of The Actuary magazine discussing the importance of actuaries staying relevant in today’s and the future’s work force.

Description: This paper investigates the use of models of dependent mortality for determining annuity values. We discuss a broad class of parametric models using a bivariate survivorship function called a copula. Using data from a large insurance company to illustrate our methods, we calculate maximum likelihood estimates to calibrate the rnodel.

Description: This article will highlight the issue that the sum of key-rate metrics does not add to metrics derived by parallel shift to the entire curve, even at very low shift size. Additionally, in the article I will outline how to define a single rate change to be applied to a key rate (or the entire curve) since the rate changes are generally not level or parallel.