Description: The Retirement Plans Experience Committee (RPEC) hired Ernst & Young to perform a literature review and assessment of mortality improvement rates in the United States population.

Description: This study was sponsored by the Society of Actuaries Health Section. This paper explores the relative significance of aging as a determinant of financial cost of health care beyond age 50, with particular attention to the effect for ages 65 and older. The paper presents concepts of aging factors and aging curves, which define relative values between ages for utilization or cost of health care services. General conclusions are drawn from Medicare data that utilization and cost differ by age, but that aging factors vary across services and may be less significant at very old ages. The author then turns to the question of measuring the significance of an aging curve assumption and what accuracy is lost in the simpler alternative of a single value across an age range.

Description: Appendix to the Critical Review of Stochastic Simulation Literature and Applications for Health Actuaries. The Development of a Simulation Model of Primary Prevention Strategies for Coronary Heart Disease

Description: This paper suggests that Asian financial institution openly exhibit problems and attitudes that in other regions may be buried under the surface. Therefore, becoming familiar with Asian instituions can help risk professionals unearth problems that otherwise might remain hidden in our own territoriies. From 2007 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, M-AS07-1.

Description: Enterprise risk management ERM is for the measurement and the management of all significant risks of the business holistically irrespective of types and sources. The study offers significant advances in the current debate on the performance of enterprise risk management, in particular, minimizing the existing gap between the academic understanding and practitioners’ experience on the topic.

Description: This paper focuses on the role of holism in enterprise risk management ERM. The performance measure known as market consistent embedded value is discounted for being overly reductionistic. The concept of an economic capital charge or credit is seen here as a potential bridge from the reductionistic to the holistic approach. It shows some promise for achieving holism, but falls short.

Description: Contemporary ERM has moved from an event-based view of risk to a hierarchical, systems-based approach. In order to operationalize such an approach, a methodology is proposed in this paper that draws on phylogenetic approaches that have been successfully developed for biological evolution. The technique and process provide an insight into the lineage, pace and impact of external conditions on the evolution of risks. They also provide a unique and rational classification of risk in an enterprise that can be used to optimize risk management resources. An example of a fictitious insurance company is used to illustrate the approach. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: The paper argues that Risks Evaluation at its core is a psychological process that can lead to the special type of chaos described in modern Chaos Theory. It will argue that quantification and scientific modeling does not exempt risk assessment from the potential for deep biases. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: The author constructed the efficient frontier of new business sales by modeling the embedded value and economic capital against a universe of possible growth rates of the three lines of business in a typical three-year planning horizon. The ERM function can use the efficient frontier of new business to provide a more rigorous analysis of the impact of growth rates on the firm’s overall capital efficiency and value creation, hence forming a feedback loop with the businesses in the planning process to optimize the growth strategy.

Description: The abstract for the paper A Comprehensive Defined Benefit Pension Plan Reform Proposal