Description: The abstract for the paper A Comprehensive Defined Benefit Pension Plan Reform Proposal

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This is the abstract of a paper that proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper 'A Stochastic Definition of Future Shares'. The traditional definition of actuarial future values and stochastic definition of Ramsay are discussed. A modification of Ramsay's definition is proposed and an application to life insurance reserves is presented.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Numerical Finance. This paper introduces and illustrates a new version of the Monte Carl method that has attractive properties for the numerical valuation of derivatives. The traditional Monte Carlo method has proven to be a powerful and flexible tool for many types of derivatives calculations.