This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

A timely guide to understanding and implementing credit derivatives

Credit derivatives are here to stay and will continue to play a role in finance in the future. But what will that role be? What issues and challenges should be addressed? And what lessons can be learned from the credit mess?

"Credit Risk Frontiers" offers answers to these and other questions by presenting the latest research in this field and addressing important issues exposed by the financial crisis. It covers this subject from a real world perspective, tackling issues such as liquidity, poor data, and credit spreads, as well as the latest innovations in portfolio products and hedging and risk management techniques.Provides a coherent presentation of recent advances in the theory and practice of credit derivativesTakes into account the new products and risk requirements of a post financial crisis worldContains information regarding various aspects of the credit derivative market as well as cutting edge research regarding those aspects

If you want to gain a better understanding of how credit derivatives can help your trading or investing endeavors, then "Credit Risk Frontiers" is a book you need to read.

This classic social insurance work has been updated to cover a decade of policy developments and the impact of the recent economic crisis.The book includes in-depth discussion of all major programs to reduce economic insecurity in the United States, including Social Security, Medicare, workers' compensation, unemployment compensation, and temporary disability insurance. The principles, characteristics, and policy issues associated with social insurance and public assistance programs are discussed in detail. The book examines each major cause of economic insecurity and analyzes the appropriate social insurance program for dealing with the problem.

Environmental sustainability is perhaps the key societal challenge of our times. Achieving it will require a significant level of financing and investment, and here the role of the banking industry is fundamental. Banks can play a broader and far-reaching role by adopting environmental concerns in their internal and external business operations. Principles of Green Banking is a comprehensive account of the different aspects of green banking and offers theories and principles as well as practical how-to guidelines to adopt green banking practices. This book discusses why green banking is central to achieving sustainable development. It illustrates the evolution of green banking around the world, different types of environmental risks created by firms and how these risks offer threats to sustain ability, and ongoing trends and patterns of green banking practice. Critically, it also presents an outline of the regulatory framework necessary to help the entire banking sector adapt to the change towards green banking. It is a valuable resource for financial sector professionals and scholars in the fields of sustainable finance and banking.

The second edition of this successful text and reference presents an updated, comprehensive overview of UK and international actuarial practice and models. It offers greater worldwide appeal and application by incorporating international terminology and EU and US examples and comparisons throughout. It also features a new section on health and disability insurance, including chapters on long-term care, critical illness, income protection, and private medical insurance. The authors also provide Web-based material such as exam questions, exercises, software, references, and case studies. The new edition is an essential reference for actuaries, students, and insurance and investment statisticians.

Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap risks, yet kidnaps of foreign workers, local VIPs, and tourists are surprisingly rare and the vast majority of abductions are peacefully resolved - often for remarkably low ransoms. In fact, the market for hostages is so well ordered that the crime is insurable. This is a puzzle: ransoming a hostage is the world's most precarious trade. What would be the "right" price for your loved one - and can you avoid putting others at risk by paying it? What prevents criminals from maltreating hostages? How do you (safely) pay a ransom? And why would kidnappers release a potential future witness after receiving their money? Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business uncovers how a group of insurers at Lloyd's of London have solved these thorny problems for their customers. Based on interviews with industry insiders (from both sides), as well as hostage stakeholders, it uncovers an intricate and powerful private governance system ordering transactions between the legal and the criminal economies.

This is the seventh edition of a book long acclaimed by educators, students, and professional insurance people as an excellent source for definitions of insurance terms. The brief, succinct entries explain the meaning of words and phrases concerned with all fields of insurance-life, health, property, liability, marine, pension, surety, social, real estate, and municipal and federal regulating agencies. The more commonly used abbreviations, together with their meanings, are located at the beginning of each alphabetically ordered section. This revised edition has been expanded to include six hundred new terms in all fields, but principally in real estate insurance. It also contains a newly updated section of separate directories which gives the addresses of state insurance commissioners and organizations related to the insurance industry.

Investing in Life considers the creation and expansion of the American life insurance industry from its early origins in the 1810s through the 1860s and examines how its growth paralleled and influenced the emergence of the middle class. Using the economic instability of the period as her backdrop, Sharon Ann Murphy also analyzes changing roles for women; the attempts to adapt slavery to an urban, industrialized setting; the rise of statistical thinking; and efforts to regulate the business environment. Her research directly challenges the conclusions of previous scholars who have dismissed the importance of the earliest industry innovators while exaggerating clerical opposition to life insurance. Murphy examines insurance as both a business and a social phenomenon. She looks at how insurance companies positioned themselves within the marketplace, calculated risks associated with disease, intemperance, occupational hazard, and war, and battled fraud, murder, and suicide. She also discusses the role of consumers-their reasons for purchasing life insurance, their perceptions of the industry, and how their desires and demands shaped the ultimate product.

The challenges of the current financial environment have revealed the need for a new generation of professionals who combine training in traditional finance disciplines with an understanding of sophisticated quantitative and analytical tools. Risk Management and Simulation shows how simulation modeling and analysis can help you solve risk management problems related to market, credit, operational, business, and strategic risk. Simulation models and methodologies offer an effective way to address many of these problems and are easy for finance professionals to understand and use. Drawing on the author s extensive teaching experience, this accessible book walks you through the concepts, models, and computational techniques.

How Simulation Models Can Help You Manage Risk More Effectively

Organized into four parts, the book begins with the concepts and framework for risk management. It then introduces the modeling and computational techniques for solving risk management problems, from model development, verification, and validation to designing simulation experiments and conducting appropriate output analysis. The third part of the book delves into specific issues of risk management in a range of risk types. These include market risk, equity risk, interest rate risk, commodity risk, currency risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, and strategic, business, and operational risks. The author also examines insurance as a mechanism for risk management and risk transfer. The final part of the book explores advanced concepts and techniques. The book contains extensive review questions and detailed quantitative or computational exercises in all chapters. Use of MATLAB(r) mathematical software is encouraged and suggestions for MATLAB functions are provided throughout.

Learn Step by Step, from Basic Concepts to More Complex Models

Packed with applied examples and exercises, this book builds from elementary models for risk to more sophisticated, dynamic models for risks that evolve over time. A comprehensive introduction to simulation modeling and analysis for risk management, it gives you the tools to better assess and manage the impact of risk in your organizations. The book can also serve as a support reference for readers preparing for CFA exams, GARP FRM exams, PRMIA PRM exams, and actuarial exams.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the insurance industry has cast a safety net around the world, first in the British Isles and then further afield, irrespective of cultural, political and ideological divides. Unlike previous publications on insurance history, which tend to discuss the development of national markets or individual companies, this book focuses on the creation of networks across borders from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day.
Distinguished international economic historians draw upon examples from twenty countries across the continents to demonstrate how what was called the 'British system' of risk management spread out in waves, and describes the forces that made this possible--first among them migration from Europe and international trade. The book explores the economic, political, religious, and cultural obstacles that blocked the path of this European invention--not only religious law and traditional practices, but above all protectionism, inflation, and political ideologies. It examines the process of transformation through which modern insurance supplanted traditional forms of protection against perils and risks and was able to keep on offering new ways of dealing with the risks of modern life. As well as discussing primary insurance, it also considers the role played by reinsurance, without which the losses arising out of today's natural and man-made disasters would be immeasurably greater. Finally, taking modern-day disaster scenarios as examples, the book shows just what the limits of insurability are and what risks worldwide networks entail.

The focus of this book is on the two major areas of risk theory: aggregate claims distributions and ruin theory. For aggregate claims distributions, detailed descriptions are given of recursive techniques that can be used in the individual and collective risk models. For the collective model, the book discusses different classes of counting distribution, and presents recursion schemes for probability functions and moments. For the individual model, the book illustrates the three most commonly applied techniques. Beyond the classical topics in ruin theory, this new edition features an expanded section covering time of ruin problems, Gerber-Shiu functions, and the application of De Vylder approximations. Suitable for a first course in insurance risk theory and extensively classroom tested, the book is accessible to readers with a solid understanding of basic probability. Numerous worked examples are included and each chapter concludes with exercises for which complete solutions are provided.

This book will be a "must" for people who want good knowledge of big data concepts and their applications in the real world, particularly in the field of insurance. It will be useful to people working in finance and to masters students using big data tools. The authors present the bases of big data: data analysis methods, learning processes, application to insurance and position within the insurance market. Individual chapters a will be written by well-known authors in this field.

The 2008 financial collapse, the expansion of corporate and private wealth, the influence of money in politics-many of Wall Street's contemporary trends can be traced back to the work of fourteen critical figures who wrote, and occasionally broke, the rules of American finance. Edward Morris plots in absorbing detail Wall Street's transformation from a clubby enclave of financiers to a symbol of vast economic power. His book begins with J. Pierpont Morgan, who ruled the American banking system at the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with Sandy Weill, whose collapsing Citigroup required the largest taxpayer bailout in history. In between, Wall Streeters relates the triumphs and missteps of twelve other financial visionaries. From Charles Merrill, who founded Merrill Lynch and introduced the small investor to the American stock market; to Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king; to Jack Bogle, whose index funds redefined the mutual fund business; to Myron Scholes, who laid the groundwork for derivative securities; and to Benjamin Graham, who wrote the book on securities analysis. Anyone interested in the modern institution of American finance will devour this history of some of its most important players.

This open access book discusses the statistical modeling of insurance problems, a process which comprises data collection, data analysis and statistical model building to forecast insured events that may happen in the future. It presents the mathematical foundations behind these fundamental statistical concepts and how they can be applied in daily actuarial practice. Statistical modeling has a wide range of applications, and, depending on the application, the theoretical aspects may be weighted differently: here the main focus is on prediction rather than explanation. Starting with a presentation of state-of-the-art actuarial models, such as generalized linear models, the book then dives into modern machine learning tools such as neural networks and text recognition to improve predictive modeling with complex features. Providing practitioners with detailed guidance on how to apply machine learning methods to real-world data sets, and how to interpret the results without losing sight of the mathematical assumptions on which these methods are based, the book can serve as a modern basis for an actuarial education syllabus.