Dr. Gary Parker

Status:
Associate Professor

Affiliation:
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, SFU

E-mail:
gparker at stat dot sfu dot ca
Phone:
(778) 782-4818
Fax:
(778) 782-4368
Office:
K 10562


My research interests lie in Actuarial Science. The general problem I have been studying is that of modeling portfolios of insurance policies under dual randomness of mortality and interest rates. I am particularly interested in finding the moments and, when possible, approximating the distribution of the present value of the benefits of such portfolios. This problem is becoming a major area of research in Actuarial Science. A better understanding of the portfolio approach is very useful, for example, in determining appropriate contingency reserves, in financial solvency assessment, in valuation of blocks of businesses, and in pricing of products. The mortality risk is one that is diversifiable, i.e., it can be reduced by increasing the size of the portfolio, due to the Central Limit Theorem. However, the interest rate risk does not follow this rule because of the highly dependent investment rates of return that exist between policies of any given portfolio. This dependency between policies complicates the problem enormously. For example, we may want to find the distribution of the sum of correlated random variables with mixed log-normal distributions. I am also interested in the closely related problem of modeling the movement of interest rates. Many different models have been suggested in finance, like the Vasicek or the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross models. These models and others may be used when studying portfolios of insurance policies.

Selected Publications

The Actuarial Programs at SFU

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