Description: Dynamically Hedging Insurance Product Risk by Marshall C. Greenbaum from Risks and Rewards Newsletter, April 2000, Issue No. 34. A dynamic hedging program cab be an effective solution to insurance company market risk management problems.

Description: The article provides a summary of the Drake Risk & Opportunity Forum held on October 21, 2022. The forum was a hybrid conference that attracted more than 200 attendees from 17 states, two countries, 48 employers, and five universities. Following an introduction by the Zimpleman College of Business Dean, the forum held six sessions. First was an insurance company CRO panel followed by a panel of non-insurance company CROs. Gary Zhu shared his outlook for interest rates and capital markets. The fourth panel discussed insurance capital models. The fifth panel discussed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria when building insurance company investment portfolios. The final session of the day was a discussion about the NAIC, how they operate, and their priorities for the coming year.

Description: Our previous article, “Introduction of Cashflow Matching Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) Framework,” introduced the concept and included a real-world case study that developed a liability-driven investment strategy for a single line of business (LOB) for a life insurer. This article expands the framework and the case study from a single LOB to simultaneously optimize asset allocation across multiple LOBs. It discusses how this multi-line SAA framework can enable an insurance company to efficiently tag its asset holdings to each LOB, identify opportunities in the public and private asset markets to enhance risk-adjusted returns, and develop a deeper understanding of the trade-off between the degree of cashflow matching and risk-adjusted returns across LOBs.

Description: The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utilize natural hedging have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging to a firm that writes only one of the lines of business.

Description: This article discusses the possibility of high inflation down the road. The high levels of debt incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be difficult for many countries to support. Central bank activity is "standing in the gap" but this is not necessarily the optimal solution. Inflation can also become an issue due to contagion coming from less financially stable countries, resulting a crisis of confidence, driving up interest rates.

Description: The author compares and contrasts methodologies used for value investing and enterprise risk management.

Description: This paper discusses both the theoretical and the application aspects of stress testing in managing enterprise risks. Effective stress testing maximizes the risk adjusted enterprise profit by controlling major risks financial, strategic, operational and hazard upon identifying risk metrics and modeling the correlations. A case study is included for demonstration purposes.

Description: This article presents the background around the Post Retirement Needs and Risk call for essays focused on: (1) defined contribution plan risk management strategies; (2) decumulation strategies for retirement and (3) long-term care financing. The important essays from that exercise are presented in this Pension Section News publication along with interviews of the winning authors.