In this highly influential textbook, first published in 1952, actuaries Ogborn and Coe provide a condensed overview of many aspects of life assurance for the actuary-in-training. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of actuarial practice.

Knowledge of risk models and the assessment of risk is a fundamental part of the training of actuaries and all who are involved in financial, pensions and insurance mathematics. This book provides students and others with a firm foundation in a wide range of statistical and probabilistic methods for the modelling of risk, including short-term risk modelling, model-based pricing, risk-sharing, ruin theory and credibility. It covers much of the international syllabuses for professional actuarial examinations in risk models, but goes into further depth, with worked examples, exercises and detailed case studies. The authors also use the statistical package R to demonstrate how simple code and functions can be used profitably in an actuarial context. The authors' engaging and pragmatic approach, balancing rigour and intuition and developed over many years of teaching the subject, makes this book ideal for self-study or for students taking courses in risk modelling.

Having the right investment beliefs and putting them into practice is key to delivering the right results. Decision makers in the investment industry should worry less about the stocks and products they pick for their clients and more about getting the big picture right; developing investment beliefs are instrumental in making the right choices.

The subprime crisis has shown that the sophisticated risk management models used by banks and insurance companies had serious flaws. Some people even suggest that these models are completely useless. Others claim that the crisis was just an unpredictable accident that was largely amplified by the lack of expertise and even naivety of many investors. This book takes the middle view. It shows that these models have been designed for "tranquil times," when financial markets behave smoothly and efficiently. However, we are living in more and more "turbulent times": large risks materialize much more often than predicted by "normal" models, financial models periodically go through bubbles and crashes. Moreover, financial risks result from the decisions of economic actors who can have incentives to take excessive risks, especially when their remunerations are ill designed. The book provides a clear account of the fundamental hypotheses underlying the most popular models of risk management and show that these hypotheses are flawed. However it shows that simple models can still be useful, provided they are well understood and used with caution.

This is the first book at the graduate textbook level to discuss analyzing financial data with S-PLUS. Its originality lies in the introduction of tools for the estimation and simulation of heavy tail distributions and copulas, the computation of measures of risk, and the principal component analysis of yield curves. The book is aimed at undergraduate students in financial engineering; master students in finance and MBA's, and to practitioners with financial data analysis concerns.

A powerful and path-breaking expose of America's Medical Industrial Complex-the network of mutually beneficial relationships between big business, academic medicine, patient advocacy organizations, hospitals, and government-and a compelling way forward for transforming America's healthcare system How has the United States, with more resources than any nation, developed a healthcare system that delivers much poorer results, at near double the cost of any other developed country-such that legendary seer Warren Buffett calls the Medical Industrial Complex "the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness"? Mike Magee, M.D., who worked for years inside the Medical Industrial Complex administering a hospital and then as a senior executive at the giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer, has spent the last decade deconstructing the complex, often shocking rise of, and connectivity between, the pillars of our health system-Big Pharma, insurance companies, hospitals, the American Medical Association, and anyone affiliated with them. With an eye first and foremost on the bottom line rather than on the nation's health, each sector has for decades embraced cure over care, aiming to conquer disease rather than concentrate on the cultural and social factors that determine health. This decision Magee calls the "original sin" of our health system. Code Blue is a riveting, character-driven narrative that draws back the curtain on the giant industry that consumes one out of every five American dollars. Making clear for the first time the mechanisms, greed, and collusion by which our medical system was built over the last eight decades-and arguing persuasively and urgently for the necessity of a single-payer, multi-plan insurance arena of the kind enjoyed by every other major developed nation-Mike Magee gives us invaluable perspective and inspiration by which we can, indeed, reshape the future.

This must-have manual provides detailed solutions to all of the 300 exercises in Dickson, Hardy and Waters' Actuarial Mathematics for Life Contingent Risks, 3 edition. This groundbreaking text on the modern mathematics of life insurance is required reading for the Society of Actuaries' (SOA) LTAM Exam. The new edition treats a wide range of newer insurance contracts such as critical illness and long-term care insurance; pension valuation material has been expanded; and two new chapters have been added on developing models from mortality data and on changing mortality. Beyond professional examinations, the textbook and solutions manual offer readers the opportunity to develop insight and understanding through guided hands-on work, and also offer practical advice for solving problems using straightforward, intuitive numerical methods. Companion Excel spreadsheets illustrating these techniques are available for free download.

The result of two key social developments in recent years are examined here: the partial dismantling of the welfare state and the progress of genetics. Genetic insights are increasingly valuable for risk assessment, and insurers would like to use these insights to help determine premiums. Combined with the fact that social welfare is being curtailed, this could potentially create an uninsured high-risk population. Along with considerations of autonomy and privacy, this is the basis for an ethical critique of insurer's access to information. The result has often been regulation of such information; but the authors argues that due to adverse selection, regulation will not solve these problems, and this may jeopardize the survival of private personal insurance. Instead, we should look towards the resurrection of social insurance, a key component of the welfare state. This will interest academic researchers as well as professionals involved with genetics and insurance.

Wer sich als Vermittler selbstandig macht, muss gerade am Anfang einige ungewohnte Hurden uberwinden. Doch wem ein guter Start gelingt, wird schnell die ersten Erfolge verbuchen koennen. Dieses Buch macht fit fur eine erfolgreiche Agenturfuhrung. Es zeigt Schritt fur Schritt, wie selbstandige Vermittler oder Agenturinhaber in der Assekuranz ihr eigenes Unternehmen optimal entwickeln koennen. Der Themenkomplex "Mini- und Midi-Jobs in der Agentur" wurde komplett aktualisiert. Ausserdem enthalt die Betrachtung der Gewinngestaltung einer Agentur alle wichtigen AEnderungen, die sich aus der Unternehmensteuerreform ergeben haben. Die Neuauflage enthalt zudem Tipps, wie Agenturinhaber Social Media wirkungsvoll in ihre Arbeit integrieren koennen. Ein provokanter und impulsgebender Ratgeber, der durch die praxisorientierte Darstellung eine unmittelbare Umsetzung ermoeglicht. Mit zahlreichen Beispielen und Checklisten.

Gerald Feldman's history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources, making this a more accurate account of Allianz and the men who directed its business than was ever before possible. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis, touching on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labor camps, and the problems of denazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study--when cooperation with Nazi policies was compulsory and when it was complicit, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated--are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on open access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era. Gerald D. Feldman is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Great Disorder (Oxford, 1993) received the DAAD Book Prize of the German Historical Association and the Book Prize for Central European History from the American Historical Association. He was an invited expert at the London Gold Conference in December 1997 and at the U.S. Conference on Holocaust Assets in Washington, D.C. in December 1998 and served as an advisor to the Presidential Commision on Holocaust Assets in the United States.

Die vorliegende Arbeit bietet eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Berufsstand des Industrieversicherungsmaklers (IVM) in Deutschland. Analysiert werden Ursachen und Auswirkungen des Wandels, in dem sich der IVM gegenwartig befindet. Die Eroerterung der Ursachen konzentriert sich auf die Veranderung der Kundenbedurfnisse sowie auf die Entwicklung von Instrumenten des Alternativen Risikotransfers. Im Mittelpunkt der Diskussion um die Auswirkungen des Umbruchs steht im Hauptteil der Arbeit die Darstellung der Veranderungsprozesse im Leistungsangebot (in Richtung Risk Consulting), im Vergutungssystem (Courtage- vs. Honorarvergutung aus praktischer, informationsoekonomischer und rechtlicher Sicht) und in der Organisationsstruktur von IVM (Globalisierungstendenzen / Einbindung von Insurance Brokers in Finanzkonglomerate).