Property Casualty Insurance Loss Reserving Practices

This handbook presents the basic aspects of actuarial loss reserving. Besides the traditional methods, it also includes a description of more recent ones and a discussion of certain problems occurring in actuarial practice, like inflation, scarce data, large claims, slow loss development, the use of market statistics, the need for simulation techniques and the task of calculating best estimates and ranges of future losses. In property and casualty insurance the provisions for payment obligations from losses that have occurred but have not yet been settled usually constitute the largest item on the liabilities side of an insurer's balance sheet. For this reason, the determination and evaluation of these loss reserves is of considerable economic importance for every property and casualty insurer. Actuarial students, academics as well as practicing actuaries will benefit from this overview of the most important actuarial methods of loss reserving by developing an understanding of the underlying stochastic models and how to practically solve some problems which may occur in actuarial practice.

All property and casualty insurers are required to carry out loss reserving as a statutory accounting function. Thus, loss reserving is an essential sphere of activity, and one with its own specialized body of knowledge. While few books have been devoted to the topic, the amount of published research literature on loss reserving has almost doubled in size during the last fifteen years. Greg Taylor's book aims to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of loss reserving that reflects contemporary research advances to date. Divided into two parts, the book covers both the conventional techniques widely used in practice, and more specialized loss reserving techniques employing stochastic models. Part I, Deterministic Models, covers very practical issues through the abundant use of numerical examples that fully develop the techniques under consideration. Part II, Stochastic Models, begins with a chapter that sets up the additional theoretical material needed to illustrate stochastic modeling. The remaining chapters in Part II are self-contained, and thus can be approached independently of each other. A special feature of the book is the use throughout of a single real life data set to illustrate the numerical examples and new techniques presented. The data set illustrates most of the difficult situations presented in actuarial practice. This book will meet the needs for a reference work as well as for a textbook on loss reserving.

"This text provides a basic foundation of knowledge concerning two fundamental building blocks of property/casualty actuarial work: ratemaking and loss reserving. Although the material is of property/casualty origins, the methods presented have potential application in other insurance areas including health insurance and risk management. The text contains a number of worked examples and end-of-chapter exercises"--

"Gitty Up" shouted the driver, as he encouraged the laboring horses to pull the ladened "prairie schooner" faster westward across the prairie. In the "prairie schooners" the people were excited and anxious to reach the vast prairie of Nebraska. They wanted to rush to the land, select their free land, and build their homes. Among the settlers on the Nebraska plains were the Author's parents. In this book the reader has a glimpse of their simple home, the care of the livestock on the farm, the planting and harvesting of the crops, the brutal weather, and the challenges of isolation. Every family depended on their horses for survival. Man power combined with horse power with determination resulted in permanent settlements. When tractors began to emerge for farming, then horses retired from field work. Whoa!