Amino acids play a role in the defence mechanisms and stress responses of plants, as well as in food quality and safety for humans and animals. Recent advances in the field make a comprehensive overview of the information a necessity; this book collates chapters on plant enzymes and metabolism, modulation, molecular aspects and secondary products. Also including information on ecology, the environment and mammalian nutrition and toxicology, it provides an authoritative resource.

Focusing on life insurance and pensions, this book addresses various aspects of modelling in modern insurance: insurance liabilities; asset-liability management; securitization, hedging, and investment strategies. With contributions from internationally renowned academics in actuarial science, finance, and management science and key people in major life insurance and reinsurance companies, there is expert coverage of a wide range of topics, for example: models in life insurance and their r...

This book proposes a review of Long-Term Care insurance; this issue is addressed both from a global point of view (through a presentation of the risk of dependence associated with the aging of the population) and an actuarial point of view (with the presentation of existing insurance products and actuarial techniques for pricing and reserving).It proposes a cross-view of American and European experiences for this risk.This book is the first dedicated entirely to long-term c...

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 persp...

This is the only book actuaries need to understand generalized linear models (GLMs) for insurance applications. GLMs are used in the insurance industry to support critical decisions. Until now, no text has introduced GLMs in this context or addressed the problems specific to insurance data. Using insurance data sets, this practical, rigorous book treats GLMs, covers all standard exponential family distributions, extends the methodology to correlated data structures, and discusses recent de...

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 Wüthrich combine ideas from financial mathematics...

This text gives budding actuaries and financial analysts a foundation in multiple regression and time series. They will learn about these statistical techniques using data on the demand for insurance, lottery sales, foreign exchange rates, and other applications. Although no specific knowledge of risk management or finance is presumed, the approach introduces applications in which statistical techniques can be used to analyze real data of interest. In addition to the fundamentals, this boo...

Focusing on what actuaries need in practice, this introductory account provides readers with essential tools for handling complex problems and explains how simulation models can be created, used and re-used (with modifications) in related situations. The book begins by outlining the basic tools of modelling and simulation, including a discussion of the Monte Carlo method and its use. Part II deals with general insurance and Part III with life insurance and financial risk. Algorithms that c...

Strategic planning, including the required quantitative methods, is an essential part of bank management and control. In this book capital, risk and yield are treated comprehensively and seamlessly. And a thorough introduction to the advanced methods of risk management for all sectors of banking is discussed. In addition, directly applicable concepts and data such as macroeconomic scenarios for strategic planning and stress testing as well as detailed scenarios for operational risk and adv...

Predictive modeling involves the use of data to forecast future events. It relies on capturing relationships between explanatory variables and the predicted variables from past occurrences and exploiting this to predict future outcomes. Forecasting future financial events is a core actuarial skill - actuaries routinely apply predictive-modeling techniques in insurance and other risk-management applications. This book is for actuaries and other financial analysts who are developing their ex...

Mortality improvements, uncertainty in future mortality trends and the relevant impact on life annuities and pension plans constitute important topics in the field of actuarial mathematics and life insurance techniques. In particular, actuarial calculations concerning pensions, life annuities and other living benefits (provided, for example, by long-term care insurance products and whole life sickness covers) are based on survival probabilities which necessarily extend over a long time hor...

The author's particular interest in the area of risk measures is to combine this theory with the analysis of dependence properties. The present volume gives an introduction of basic concepts and methods in mathematical risk analysis, in particular of those parts of risk theory that are of special relevance to finance and insurance. Describing the influence of dependence in multivariate stochastic models on risk vectors is the main focus of the text that presents main ideas and methods as w...