Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. The purpose of this session is to enhance understanding of what it means to have an adequate reserve based on cash-flow testing by taking the audience into the world of interest rate models and interest rate model generators.

Description: The goal for an insurance firm is to maximize value. This paper describes the approach using an objective function of the Option Adjusted Value of Distributable Earnings OAVDE. The paper provides a review of the evolution of accounting treatment suggests a methodology for estimating market value of assets and liabilities extends that market value to the value of the firm using OAVDE and illustrates how this methodology can be incorporated into an insurance firm's financial management. From Society of Actuaries Financial Reporting Monograph, M-AS99-1.

Description: Presented at 1995 Valuation Actuary Symposium. Discusses the evolving nature of the work of the valuation actuary, including asset liability management, cash flow testing and the responsibilities of the valuation actuary in management decisions.

Description: This article discusses asset-liability management from two different paradigms, one a simulation of the firm as an external observer e.g. shareholder would view it, and the other a “still life” at a given moment from an internal viewpoint.

Description: This session at the 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium presents a framework for managing surplus based on the knowledge bases of the CFA designation and the SOA curriculum for the finance and investment specialty.

Description: This paper identifies several implicit assumptions underlying the use of the lognormal distribution for modeling the periodic change in the interest rate of a given maturity, tests those assumptions against historical interest rates, and presents additional information from those tests. A discussion of the paper follows. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1991, Vol. 43.

Description: A Framework for Managing Surplus by David N. Becker from The Financial Reporter, May 1999, Issue No. 39.

Description: 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium. In this open forum questions were fielded by the panel of experts. Some of the questions: 1. How do you pick spreads for use in your reinvestment strategy? 2. What's generally being done in terms of dynamically modeling policyholder lapsation? 3. How do companies treat riders and dump-in premiums and estimated gross profits for GAAP? 4. What impact does the current interest environment have on testing you are going to do this year? 5. Are there any suitable techniques for trying to aggregate the variable products with the fixed products?

Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting, New York. This session is about the use of cash-flow testing in product development. Topics addressed: 1. The problem of interest rate risk and its driving forces. 2. The assumptions needed for cash-flow testing. 3. The pros and cons of deterministic versus stochastic testing. 4. The economic quantities measured in cash-flow testing. 5. The the technique of market-value analysis. 6. Research done to apply modem finance theory to determine the net worth of the enterprise in a way that directly demonstrates the financial impact of embedded options in assets and liabilities. 7. The technique of market-value analysis which adopts the innovations of duration/convexity analysis and option-pricing theory and applies these concepts to insurance liabilities. 8. The application of modern finance theory to determine the net worth of the enterprise. 9. A description of different uses of the OAVDE tool.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Boston Meeting covers a general overview of basic interest rate models, the meaning of an arbitrage free model, the considerations in choosing an appropriate interest rate scenario generator, the uses, alternative approaches, the double mean reverting process model - DMRP, and how good the results are in terms of historical rates. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 4b.