Section C Flashcards
List 3 categories of insurance u/w risk
- Loss reserves on prior policy years: potential adverse development
- U/W for the current policy year
- property catastrophe risk
Goldfarb
Contrast CAT Bond with traditional reinsurance
Credit Risk:
-CAT bonds are much safer since they are fully collaterized
-Reinsurance credit risk is a major concern at this magnitude
Cost:
-Highest layers usually have the highest profit margins
- Investors will accept lower spreads from CAT bonds since they offer diversification benefits (low correlation with investment returns)
Negociation
-Multi year bonds are available
-Reinsurance is usually only offered for one year period
Cummins_CAT
List advantages of using Freq/Sev distributions instead of Loss Reserve Distribution Models in quantifying u/w risk
- It is easier to account for growth in the volume of business/inflation can be more accurately reflected
- Changes in limit and deductibles can be more easily reflected
- The impact of deductibles on frequency can be accounted for
- The treatment of the split of loss between insured, insurer & reinsurer can be mutually consistent
Goldfarb
Describe the insolvency put option (EPD) method to allocate capital
EPD: Cost of protection against insolvency at given level
Objective is to achieve equivalent ratios of EPD to liabilities among lines.
Find the level of assets needed to have the same EPD ratio
Cummins_Capital
Describe two issues why comparing RAROC with cost of capital determined by CAPM or Fama-French model
- Risk in CAPM is the systematic risk associated with an investment. RAROC risk is based on the difference between the cash flowβs expected value and the values in the tail.
- The denominator of the RAROC calculation is understated, since it does not account for the
franchise value.
Goldfarb
What happens to capital requirement under lognormal distribution of LOSSES (vs normal) in the EPD method
It increases, where the difference increases as the coefficient of variation increases. This is because the probability of large losses is higher under lognormal (higher tail)
Butsic
List 3 factors that is slowing the growth of risk linked securities market
- Regulatory issues
- Accounting issues
- Tax issues
Cummins_CAT
What are sources of exposure to credit risk
- Marketable securities/derivatives/swap positions
- Insuredβs contingent premiums and deductibles receivables.
- Reinsurance recoveries
Goldfarb
Give the insolvency put option (EPD) method of capital allocation advantages and disadvantages
A:
Over VaR, this approach reflects the severity of the losses.
D:
The main problem is that it does not account for diversification.
Cummins_Capital
Describe 3 problems with CAPM model of capital allocation
- CAPM only reflects the systematic underwriting risk. It does not reflect other risks
- Ξ²i is hard to estimate
- the rates of return are impacted by other factors in addition to Ξ²
Cummins_Capital
List the criterias that need to be satisfied by the RBC method
- The standard needs to be the same for all types of insurers (personal vs commercial; primary vs reinsurers)
- The RBC needs to be objectively determined (2 insurers with the same risk exposure need to have the same RBC requirements)
- The approach should be able to distinguish between items that differ materially in level of riskiness
Butsic
How can the EPD value be compared to an option depending on the riskiness of asset and liabilities?
Liability is risky and the asset riskless:
Call option on the losses with exercise price equal to the value of the assets at the end of the year.
Assets are risky and liabilities riskless:
Put option on the ending assets: because in the event where the asset value (stock price) is less than the
liability (exercise price), the difference will be βputβ to the policyholders.
Butsic
Describe two way to determine if a line of business is profitable
RAROC: if RAROC is greater than the cost of capital, the insurer should continue to devote resources to the line.
π
π΄π
ππΆπ=ππΌπ / πΆπ
- EVA(Economic Value Added): this formula quantifies that value added to the firm from a given line:
πΈππ΄π=ππΌπβππ * πΆπ
πΈππ΄ππΆπ=ππΌπ / πΆπ β ππ
Cummins_Capital
List problems with the use of economic profit as an income measure
- Ignores franchise value
- May make less sense to management, as the economic values often do not reconcile to GAAP accounting
- Management may have difficulty justifying their decisions to external parties, as these parties only have access to statutory & GAAP accounting
Goldfarb
Briefly describe the issues when rating structured product on the same scale as single-name corporate bonds
Rating agencies did not understand the impact of errors in the correlation assumptions on the default probabilities
Coval
Describe the exceedance probability method in capital allocation
The appropriate amount of capital for each line is the amount which will equalize the exceedance probability among lines. Because the expected losses between lines usually differ in size, the above equation is usually adjusted to express everything in terms of ratios to expected loss: π[πΏππ π ππΈ(πΏππ π π)>1+πΆππΈ(πΏππ π π)]=ππ
Cummins_Capital
Briefly describe 3 modules of CAT models
- Stochastic module/Hazard module: generate the events that can occur, including the location, intensity, etc.
- Damage (vulnerability) module: derives the damage that would arise from an event, based on exposure information
- Financial analysis module: applies the insurance/reinsurance terms to the losses to determine
the financial impact to the insurer
Goldfarb
Described risk-based capital
Amount of capital needed to protect against the risks to
which it is exposed
Butsic
List ways to facilitate growth of CAT bond market according to Cummins
- Distribute information to researchers
- Regulatory reporting of CAT info when industry losses exceed threshold
- Account for reinsurance credit quality in regulatory capital requirements
Cummins_CAT
Describe 2 methods to determine the cost of capital of each line
- Base it on the cost of capital of a monoline firm that writes the same line. However, it will be difficult to find firms that write only the one line, and which have similar underwriting characteristics
- Perform regressions on the data of multiline insurers to derive cost of capital by line
Cummins_Capital
List and briefly describes the different allocation methods
- Proportional Allocation Based on a Risk Measure
Allocates the total risk capital in proportion to the separate risk measures - Incremental Allocation
Allocate capital based on the marginal impact on risk capital due to adding the entire line - Marginal Allocation
Marginal impact on risk capital due to increasing the
exposure of the line by incremental portions - Co-Measure
Calculate risk measure of individual unit in case where total losses exceed threshold
Goldfarb
Define structure finance
Structured finance involves pooling financial assets and creating a capital structure of claims (tranches)
against these pools.
Coval
What should be the accounting basis of RBC calculations and why?
Market value accounting is preferable for solvency assessment, as in the event of an insurerβs failure, the items of the balance sheet are liquidated at the market rates. Not accounting bias as with accounting book value basis.
Butsic
When are the economic capital and risk capital may be equal
Remove conservartism from loss reseves or risk margin from premiums in risk capital
Goldfarb
List some considerations when using Myers-Read method in capital allocation
- Not developed to determine the risk adjusted capital requirement
- Requires significantly more quantitative resources than other methods
- Mathematical challenges have indicated that may not be appropriate for most insurance applications
Goldfarb.
Give the Merton-Perold method of capital allocation advantages and disadvantages
A: Recognises the impact of diversification
D: Does not allocate 100% of capital, which can create a bias in risk-adjusted return measures
Cummins_Capital
List reasons why subprime repackaged mortgage (CMOs) were biased against investors
- Higher probability of default due to lower credit quality of borrowers
- Lower recovery values, because when the assets do need to be sold, they are often sold under financial pressure
- High level of default correlation due to pooling mortgages from similar geographic areas/vintages.
- Due to the CDO2 structure, the impact of errors in the estimates is magnified.
Coval
List the 3 general types of triggers of CAT bond payments
- Indemnity trigger: Based in insurerβs actual losses
- Index trigger: Based on an index of industry losses
- Hybrid trigger: Blend of more than one trigger
Cummins_CAT
Describe catastrophe risk swaps and its advantages/disadvantages
Swap between 2 (re)insurers which are exposed to
different types of catastrophic risk. The swap defines a specified amount of money that needs to be paid by each reinsurer in the occurrence of a specified event
A:
- The (re)insurer reduces some of its core risk, and achieves diversification
- Lower transaction costs than some of the other securities
D:
- It is difficult to create a swap that achieves parity
- Can create more exposure to basis risk that some other types of contracts
- Not prefunded
Cummins_CAT
What needs to be done to correlation when elements are on opposite side of the balanche sheet
It needs to be multiplied by -1
Butsic
What is the criticism of tail-based methods to determine capital allocation?
They ignore losses below the threshold
Bodoff
Describe 3 methods to quantify dependency in CAT models (and disadvantages)
- Empirical analysis of Historical Data.
Disadvantages include:
a. usually there is insufficient data to calculate the historical dependency
b. there is little insight as to how the dependencies will change during tail events - Subjective Estimates: advantages include:
a. can account for the tail events
b. reflects the userβs intuition
Disadvantages include:
a. the number of risk categories increases, the number of dependency parameters that need to be estimated increases exponentially - Explicit Factor Models: these link the variability of the risks to common factors
Goldfarb
Describe the two alternative views of capital allocation by percentile layer
1) Horizontal procedure: Allocating each layer of capital to the loss events that penetrate the layer
2) Vertical procedure: Allocating capital to each loss events based upon the layers that it penetrates
Bodoff
Describe the impact of default probabilities on tranches for ABS structured finance
As the default probability increases,
- The expected payoff on the collateral decreases monotonically. This impacts the tranches.
- The sensitivity of the tranches to the probability depends on their seniority
Coval