Many risks face the global insurance industry today, including the aging populations of developed countries, competition from other financial institutions, and both disparate and quickly changing regulatory demands, to name a few. The book s contributors offer their unique perspectives on challenges confronting the insurance industry and how attendant risks can be most effectively managed.

How much is a human life worth? Individuals, families, companies, and governments routinely place a price on human life. The calculations that underlie these price tags are often buried in technical language, yet they influence our economy, laws, behaviors, policies, health, and safety. These price tags are often unfair, infused as they are with gender, racial, national, and cultural biases that often result in valuing the lives of the young more than the old, the rich more than the poor, whites more than blacks, Americans more than foreigners, and relatives more than strangers. This is critical since undervalued lives are left less-protected and more exposed to risk. Howard Steven Friedman explains in simple terms how economists and data scientists at corporations, regulatory agencies, and insurance companies develop and use these price tags and points a spotlight at their logical flaws and limitations. He then forcefully argues against the rampant unfairness in the system. Readers will be enlightened, shocked, and, ultimately, empowered to confront the price tags we assign to human lives and understand why such calculations matter.

Originally published in 1939, this book forms the second part of a two-volume series on the mathematics required for the examinations of the Institute of Actuaries, focusing on finite differences, probability and elementary statistics. Miscellaneous examples are included at the end of the text. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in actuarial science and mathematics.

Risk management for financial institutions is one of the key topics the financial industry has to deal with. The present volume is a mathematically rigorous text on solvency modeling. Currently, there are many new developments in this area in the financial and insurance industry (Basel III and Solvency II), but none of these developments provides a fully consistent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of solvency questions. Merz and Wuthrich combine ideas from financial mathematics (no-arbitrage theory, equivalent martingale measure), actuarial sciences (insurance claims modeling, cash flow valuation) and economic theory (risk aversion, probability distortion) to provide a fully consistent framework. Within this framework they then study solvency questions in incomplete markets, analyze hedging risks, and study asset-and-liability management questions, as well as issues like the limited liability options, dividend to shareholder questions, the role of re-insurance, etc. This work embeds the solvency discussion (and long-term liabilities) into a scientific framework and is intended for researchers as well as practitioners in the financial and actuarial industry, especially those in charge of internal risk management systems. Readers should have a good background in probability theory and statistics, and should be familiar with popular distributions, stochastic processes, martingales, etc.

Health Insurance aims at filling a gap in actuarial literature, attempting to solve the frequent misunderstanding in regards to both the purpose and the contents of health insurance products (and 'protection products', more generally) on the one hand, and the relevant actuarial structures on the other. In order to cover the basic principles regarding health insurance techniques, the first few chapters in this book are mainly devoted to the need for health insurance and a description of insurance products in this area (sickness insurance, accident insurance, critical illness covers, income protection, long-term care insurance, health-related benefits as riders to life insurance policies). An introduction to general actuarial and risk-management issues follows. Basic actuarial models are presented for sickness insurance and income protection (i.e. disability annuities). Several numerical examples help the reader understand the main features of pricing and reserving in the health insurance area. A short introduction to actuarial models for long-term care insurance products is also provided. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in actuarial sciences; graduate students in economics, business and finance; and professionals and technicians operating in insurance and pension areas will find this book of benefit.

In dieser Open-Access-Publikation analysieren die Autoren die oeffentliche Debatte um Chancen und Risiken von Big Data und diskutieren die konkreten Implikationen in verschiedenen Lebensbereichen. In einer reprasentativen Befragung vermessen sie das Wissen und die Einstellung der Bevoelkerung zu Big Data. Im Ergebnis verhalten sich die Nutzer paradox, sorglos und besorgt zugleich. Gezeigt wird aber auch, an welchen Punkten die Burger aufgeschlossen fur einen neuen Umgang mit Big Data sind. Daten-Sharing, Open Data finden durchaus Akzeptanz, ebenso auch neue Muster fur bestehende Branchen, jenseits der tradierten Vorstellungen.

In four empirical studies, this cumulative work provides valuable insights for marketing executives of statutory health insurance funds and social media responsible. Paper I and II provide evidence about the importance and interplay of price and corporate reputation on the market of statutory health insurance. The second part changes perspective to corporate communication issues in the social media environment. By introducing the "social media brand value chain" paper III conducts a literature review of state of the art social media research. By means of a field experiment on Facebook, paper IV shows that brands do not necessarily have to communicate via their brand fan pages in a highly interactive and vivid way to positively influence attitudinal measures among their fan base.

This book explores the central problems underlying the insurance of aviation war and terrorism risks and associated perils. It critically analyses the reasons why conventional insurance markets are unwilling or unable to provide sustainable insurance coverage for aviation war and terrorism risks in the aftermath of catastrophic events such as the terrorist events of September 11, 2001. It also examines some of the prominent concepts proposed and/or implemented after 9/11 to determine whether and to what extent these concepts avoid identified pitfalls. Like many of life's essentials, the importance of insurance is most evident when it is not available. The sheer scale and magnitude of the insurance losses that followed 9/11 caused conventional insurance markets (which hitherto had been offering generous insurance coverage for aviation war and terrorism risks to air transport operators for little or no premium) to withdraw coverage forthwith. The ensuing absence or insufficiency of commercial insurance coverage for aviation war and terrorism risks has sparked a global search for viable and sustainable alternatives. Ten years have since elapsed, and despite numerous efforts, the fundamental problems remain unresolved. The book proceeds on the premise that the underlying issues are not entirely legal in nature; they have immense economic, psychological and policy implications that cannot be underestimated. A multidisciplinary approach is therefore used in examining the issues, drawing heavily upon analytical principles adapted from law and economics and behavioural law and economics. It is hoped that the resulting study will be beneficial not only to lawyers and those interested in aviation insurance but also to economists, air transport insurance program managers, capital market investors and governmental policymakers, both at the national and international levels.

This book is a compilation of 21 papers presented at the International Cramer Symposium on Insurance Mathematics (ICSIM) held at Stockholm University in June, 2013. The book comprises selected contributions from several large research communities in modern insurance mathematics and its applications.

The main topics represented in the book are modern risk theory and its applications, stochastic modelling of insurance business, new mathematical problems in life and non-life insurance and related topics in applied and financial mathematics.

The book is an original and useful source of inspiration and essential reference for a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied researchers, research students and experts from the insurance business. In this way, "Modern Problems in Insurance Mathematics" will contribute to the development of research and academy industry co-operation in the area of insurance mathematics and its applications."

This book presents a market-consistent valuation framework for implicit embedded options in life insurance contracts. This framework is used to perform an empirical analysis based on more than 110,000 actual and in-force life insurance policies and with a focus on the modeling of interest rates. Its results are the answer to the central question posed in the objectives: What value do the embedded options and guarantees considered have? This question is answered both absolutely and relative to the current policy reserves, from the perspective of the insurer, the policyholder and the shareholder respectively

The main purpose of the book is to show how a viscosity approach can be used to tackle control problems in insurance. The problems covered are the maximization of survival probability as well as the maximization of dividends in the classical collective risk model. The authors consider the possibility of controlling the risk process by reinsurance as well as by investments. They show that optimal value functions are characterized as either the unique or the smallest viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation; they also study the structure of the optimal strategies and show how to find them. The viscosity approach was widely used in control problems related to mathematical finance but until quite recently it was not used to solve control problems related to actuarial mathematical science. This book is designed to familiarize the reader on how to use this approach. The intended audience is graduate students as well as researchers in this area.

Capital Requirements, Disclosure, and Supervision in the European Insurance Industry provides an in-depth analysis of Solvency II's issues by combining both a theoretical approach and evidence of the empirical implications and effects on the European insurance industry.

Macroprudential policies, tools and supervision have become important since the last financial crisis. This book addresses general and methodological issues and provides a framework for the analysis of macroprudential policies and supervision in insurance. It focuses on policy related issues and global level aspects of macroprudential in insurance.

Natural disasters such as large-scale flooding are on the increase. Climate change directly affects our basis of existence. This includes residential buildings, and commercial and industrial properties. The author highlights the requirements that will have to be met by a protection system for buildings in the future. Insurance against natural hazards lies at the heart of such a system. The insurance systems of Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and the USA are presented. The author explains what type of insurance system is best suited to meet the challenge of climate change. The starting point of the legal section is statutory insurance with a monopoly. The question of whether such insurance is compatible with Swiss and EU law is examined. Keywords in this respect are economic freedom, competition, services of general interest and universal service.

The first practitioner handbook on export credit insurance and guarantees, providing manufacturers, exporters, bankers, and lawyers with a much needed resource. The book contains descriptions and analyses of almost every type of export credit insurance and guarantee used in international trade with explanations about the risks inherent in each.

Motivated by the many and long-standing contributions of H. Gerber and E. Shiu, this book gives a modern perspective on the problem of ruin for the classical Cramer-Lundberg model and the surplus of an insurance company. The book studies martingales and path decompositions, which are the main tools used in analysing the distribution of the time of ruin, the wealth prior to ruin and the deficit at ruin. Recent developments in exotic ruin theory are also considered. In particular, by making dividend or tax payments out of the surplus process, the effect on ruin is explored. Gerber-Shiu Risk Theory can be used as lecture notes and is suitable for a graduate course. Each chapter corresponds to approximately two hours of lectures.

professional-standards-review organizations (PSRO) in defining quality of care for the Medicare program; it is a "shared responsibility of health professionals and government to provide a reasonable basis for confidence that action will be taken, both to assess whether services meet professionally recognized standards and to correct any deficiencies that may be found" (p. 14). Similar pronouncements have been made for the quality assurance activities of the Department of Defense's CHAMPUS program and of the 1980s successor to the PSROs, the federally designated peer-review organizations (PROs), established to ensure quality and utilization-efficient care for Medicare. Links between the federal and state gov ernments and between professional associations and private review entities have been developed to make this "shared responsibility" manifest in the delivery and reimbursement of health services. This responsibility is seen in light of both pro fessional and legal accountability, a view noted by Gibson and Singhas (1978) and Alger (1980). Accountability, then, becomes a concentric concept that elaborates on the pure view of quality and reflects the federal government's consumer protection activities during the 1970s. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), which has pro vided another primary historical leadership role in defining quality assurance, has promoted the evolution of the concept of resource limitations as a part of the defini tion of quality assurance.

Value- and risk-oriented management is a holistic method of managing businesses. In this book both actuarial methods and methods pertaining to classical internal control and classical risk management are used. Therefore the approach taken is necessarily interdisciplinary. Indeed, there is a new dynamically developing field for actuaries as a result of the emphasis now on the measurement of risk.

This book provides the required basic knowledge for this subject from an actuarial perspective. It enables the reader to implement in practice a risk management system that is based on quantitative methods. With this book, the reader will additionally be able to critically appraise the applicability and the limits of the methods used in modern risk management.

"Value-oriented Management of Risk in Insurance" focuses on risk capital, capital allocation, performance measurement and value-oriented management. It also makes a connection to regulatory developments (for example, Solvency II). The reader should have a basic knowledge of probability and familiarity with mathematical concepts. It is intended for working actuaries and quantitative risk managers as well as actuarial students.

This new edition of the Handbook of Insurance reviews the last forty years of research developments in insurance and its related fields. A single reference source for professors, researchers, graduate students, regulators, consultants and practitioners, the book starts with the history and foundations of risk and insurance theory, followed by a review of prevention and precaution, asymmetric information, risk management, insurance pricing, new financial innovations, reinsurance, corporate governance, capital allocation, securitization, systemic risk, insurance regulation, the industrial organization of insurance markets and other insurance market applications. It ends with health insurance, longevity risk, long-term care insurance, life insurance financial products and social insurance.

This second version of the Handbook contains 15 new chapters. Each of the 37 chapters has been written by leading authorities in risk and insurance research, all contributions have been peer reviewed, and each chapter can be read independently of the others.

The book presents risk management from an engineering perspective. Both a systemic and analytic viewpoint are important in this regard. The introduction to the concept of 'risk' is followed by risk management principles, risk diagnostic, analysis and treatment, event analysis, crisis management, economic issues, risk governance followed by examples of practical implementation in chemistry, physics and emerging technologies such as nanoparticles. Finally, also a number of well-known major industrial accidents are discussed, and how one can learn from accidents. The book is aimed at anyone faced with risk and safety issues. The target audience can be as diverse as students, engineers, scientists, sociologists, psychologists, or actually all practitioners and academics interested in the matter.

Backward stochastic differential equations with jumps can be used to solve problems in both finance and insurance. Part I of this book presents the theory of BSDEs with Lipschitz generators driven by a Brownian motion and a compensated random measure, with an emphasis on those generated by step processes and Levy processes. It discusses key results and techniques (including numerical algorithms) for BSDEs with jumps and studies filtration-consistent nonlinear expectations and g-expectations. Part I also focuses on the mathematical tools and proofs which are crucial for understanding the theory. Part II investigates actuarial and financial applications of BSDEs with jumps. It considers a general financial and insurance model and deals with pricing and hedging of insurance equity-linked claims and asset-liability management problems. It additionally investigates perfect hedging, superhedging, quadratic optimization, utility maximization, indifference pricing, ambiguity risk minimization, no-good-deal pricing and dynamic risk measures. Part III presents some other useful classes of BSDEs and their applications. This book will make BSDEs more accessible to those who are interested in applying these equations to actuarial and financial problems. It will be beneficial to students and researchers in mathematical finance, risk measures, portfolio optimization as well as actuarial practitioners.

This book addresses an experiment in funding money damage claims in England from 2000 to 2013. The model - recoverable conditional fees - was unique and has remained so. It covers the development, amendment and effective abolition of the model, as well as the process of policy development and the motivation and objectives of the policy makers.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide is a self-improvement guide that provides ordinary people with the tools to become financially savvy quickly and successfully. Identifying the common mistakes people make when dealing with their finances, the guide sets out how to rectify them. It also highlights how one can achieve financial independence by cutting back on some expenses, like luxury cars, and the benefits of starting to save as early as possible.

The book also explains in easy-to-understand terms how to draw up and stick to a budget; make shrewd investments in various investment vehicles; consolidate and eliminate debt; draw up a will; get the most out of short-term and life insurance; and save enough money to retire.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide serves as a wake-up call to stop wasting money and start investing for a financially secure future. A must-read for anyone who wants to not only improve their finances, but also their life in general.

Dieses Standardwerk ist unverzichtbarer Ratgeber zur UEberprufung Ihres Anlageportfolios, getreu dem Motto: "Vermoegen optimieren, Steuern minimieren". Schwerpunkte aller Kapitel sind deshalb der Vermoegensaufbau sowie die Sicherung und der systematische Ausbau des Ersparten. Neben den zahlreichen AEnderungen im deutschen Steuerrecht im Jahr 2014 wird auch die Auswirkung der Finanztransaktionssteuer behandelt. Schwerpunktthemen sind des Weiteren die Geldanlage in Kunstgegenstanden, Aspekte der nachhaltigen Geldanlage und die "Ausrichtung der Portfolios in Zeiten von Krisen und Deflationsgefahr".

Risk has been described in the past by a simple measure, such as the variance, and risk attitude is often considered simply a degree of risk aversion. However, this viewpoint is usually not sufficient."Risk Measures and Attitudes"collects contributions whichillustrate how modern approaches to both risk measures and risk attitudes are inevitably intertwined. The settings under which this is discussed includeportfolio choice, mitigating credit risk and comparing risky alternatives.

This book will be a useful study aid for students and researchers of actuarial science or risk management as well as practitioners."