Related Research Articles
Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to protect against the risk of a contingent or uncertain loss.
An actuary is a professional with advanced mathematical skills who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty. The name of the corresponding field is actuarial science which covers rigorous mathematical calculations in areas of life expectancy and life insurance. These risks can affect both sides of the balance sheet and require asset management, liability management, and valuation skills. Actuaries provide assessments of financial security systems, with a focus on their complexity, their mathematics, and their mechanisms.
Financial economics is the branch of economics characterized by a "concentration on monetary activities", in which "money of one type or another is likely to appear on both sides of a trade". Its concern is thus the interrelation of financial variables, such as share prices, interest rates and exchange rates, as opposed to those concerning the real economy. It has two main areas of focus: asset pricing and corporate finance; the first being the perspective of providers of capital, i.e. investors, and the second of users of capital. It thus provides the theoretical underpinning for much of finance.
Actuarial science is the discipline that applies mathematical and statistical methods to assess risk in insurance, pension, finance, investment and other industries and professions. More generally, actuaries apply rigorous mathematics to model matters of uncertainty and life expectancy.
The International Actuarial Association (IAA) is a worldwide association of local professional actuarial associations.
The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is a global professional organization for actuaries. It was founded in 1949 as the merger of two major actuarial organizations in the United States: the Actuarial Society of America and the American Institute of Actuaries. It is a full member organization of the International Actuarial Association.
The Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) is a professional society of actuaries in North America specializing in property and casualty insurance.
Life insurance is a contract between an insurance policy holder and an insurer or assurer, where the insurer promises to pay a designated beneficiary a sum of money upon the death of an insured person. Depending on the contract, other events such as terminal illness or critical illness can also trigger payment. The policyholder typically pays a premium, either regularly or as one lump sum. The benefits may include other expenses, such as funeral expenses.
Bond valuation is the process by which an investor arrives at an estimate of the theoretical fair value, or intrinsic worth, of a bond. As with any security or capital investment, the theoretical fair value of a bond is the present value of the stream of cash flows it is expected to generate. Hence, the value of a bond is obtained by discounting the bond's expected cash flows to the present using an appropriate discount rate.
Catastrophe modeling is the process of using computer-assisted calculations to estimate the losses that could be sustained due to a catastrophic event such as a hurricane or earthquake. Cat modeling is especially applicable to analyzing risks in the insurance industry and is at the confluence of actuarial science, engineering, meteorology, and seismology.
"Stochastic" means being or having a random variable. A stochastic model is a tool for estimating probability distributions of potential outcomes by allowing for random variation in one or more inputs over time. The random variation is usually based on fluctuations observed in historical data for a selected period using standard time-series techniques. Distributions of potential outcomes are derived from a large number of simulations which reflect the random variation in the input(s).
Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) is a simulation approach that looks at an insurance enterprise's risks holistically as opposed to traditional actuarial analysis, which analyzes risks individually. Specifically, DFA reveals the dependencies of hazards and their impacts on the insurance company's financial well being such as business mix, reinsurance, asset allocation, profitability, solvency, and compliance.
Premium financing is the lending of funds to a person or company to cover the cost of an insurance premium. Premium finance loans are often provided by a third party finance entity known as a premium financing company; however insurance companies and insurance brokerages occasionally provide premium financing services through premium finance platforms. Premium financing is mainly devoted to financing life insurance which differs from property and casualty insurance.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
A life annuity is an annuity, or series of payments at fixed intervals, paid while the purchaser is alive. The majority of life annuities are insurance products sold or issued by life insurance companies however substantial case law indicates that annuity products are not necessarily insurance products.
In mathematical finance, a replicating portfolio for a given asset or series of cash flows is a portfolio of assets with the same properties. This is meant in two distinct senses: static replication, where the portfolio has the same cash flows as the reference asset, and dynamic replication, where the portfolio does not have the same cash flows, but has the same "Greeks" as the reference asset, meaning that for small changes to underlying market parameters, the price of the asset and the price of the portfolio change in the same way. Dynamic replication requires continual adjustment, as the asset and portfolio are only assumed to behave similarly at a single point.
An insurance-linked security (ILS) is a financial instrument whose value is driven by insurance loss events. Those such instruments that are linked to property losses due to natural catastrophes represent a unique asset class, the return from which is uncorrelated with that of the general financial market.
Option-adjusted spread (OAS) is the yield spread which has to be added to a benchmark yield curve to discount a security's payments to match its market price, using a dynamic pricing model that accounts for embedded options. OAS is hence model-dependent. This concept can be applied to a mortgage-backed security (MBS), or another bond with embedded options, or any other interest rate derivative or option. More loosely, the OAS of a security can be interpreted as its "expected outperformance" versus the benchmarks, if the cash flows and the yield curve behave consistently with the valuation model.
Mathematical finance, also known as quantitative finance and financial mathematics, is a field of applied mathematics, concerned with mathematical modeling of financial markets.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to corporate finance:
