Description: This research report on the effect of deflation or high inflation has six sections: 1. The first section provides background on inflation, describes some problems in measuring inflation, and explains some of its effects on an economy. 2. The second section reviews historical inflation rates. 3. The third section examines the effect of inflation or deflation on the property-liability and life insurance industries. 4. The fourth section proposes risk mitigation strategies for insurers to cope with either deflation or high inflation rates. 5. The fifth section describes a publicly available model that can be used to develop inflation/deflation projections under a regime switching format that can readily be adjusted to reflect current financial uncertainty. 6. The sixth section provides conclusions.

Description: This paper explains the development of the credit derivative market, describes the most common types of credit derivatives, discusses how insurers can and do use these instruments and explains the role they played in the financial market turmoil of 2008.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Society of Actuaries, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2004, Vol. 1.

Description: This monograph was presented at the 2011 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, held March 14-16 in Chicago. The author, writing from a property-liability insurance perspective, notes that capital allocation is a theoretical exercise because all of a firm’s capital could be depleted to cover a significant loss arising from any one segment. However, firms do need to allocate capital for pricing, risk management and performance evaluation. In this paper, the cost of capital in financial markets is incorporated into the Ruhm-Mango-Kreps algorithm to yield one allocation that reflects the true cost of capital an insurer would face. Table only.

Description: This web page summarizes the research project entitled 'The Effect of Deflation or High Inflation on the Insurance Industry.' The project is comprised of report of the same name, Excel spreadsheets that stochastically model the effects of inflation and deflation, and a users guide for the spreadsheets, all of which can be accessed from this web page.