Description: Employee termination and retirement rates affect the valuation of employee benefit plans and thus are of concern to actuaries. To provide timely experience for the profession, the Society of Actuaries Pension Plan Turnover and Retirement Rates Committee organized a data collection effort. Thirty-two contributors provided almost 1.8 million life years of pension plan turnover data for years 1994-2000. This report documents the data assembly and verification procedures used in collecting the data.

Description: This Excel workbook contains the complete set of tables developed from the Society of Actuaries 2003 Pension Plan Termination and Retirement Study. Separate tabs are included for the Basic Age Table, Basic Service Table, Select & Ultimate Table, Small Plan Age Table, and Small Plan Service Table.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to understand characteristics of a household that drive life insurance demand with more sophisticated analytical techniques. The analysis is based on the Survey of Consumer Finances data, a probability sample of the U.S. population. Household demand of two types of insurance, term life insurance and whole life insurance, is examined jointly. We model both the frequency and the severity of demand for insurance building on the work of Lin and Grace 2007 by using covariates that they developed.

Description: This paper introduces actuaries to the concept of 'copulas,' a tool for understanding relationships among multivariate outcomes. A copula is a function that links univariate marginals to their full multivariate distribution. Recently, there has been a rapidly developing literature on the statistical properties and applications of copulas. This paper explores some of these practical applications, including estimation of joint life mortality and multidecrement models. In addition, the paper describes basic properties of copulas, their relationships to measures of dependence and several families of copulas that have appeared in the literature. This paper will also be useful to those who wish to use copulas for statistical inference. Statistical inference procedures are illustrated using insurance company data on losses and expenses. For this data, the paper shows how to fit copulas and describes their usefulness by pricing a reinsurance contract and estimating expenses for pre-specified losses.

Description: Presented at October 1996 Annual Meeting. This session presents a forecasting model of economic assumptions that are inputs to projections of the Social Security system. Social Security projections are made to help policymakers understand the financial stability of the system.

Description: Abstract to research paper which introduces estimators of stock price volatility.

Description: This predictive modeling paper, “Household Life Insurance Demand – A Multivariate Two-Part Model is one of a collection of essays that examine how existing or new methods or models can be applied to the life insurance industry.

Description: An article in the Expanding Horizons newsletter, Issue 26, published in April 2003 that discusses the Annual Prize to the author or authors writing the best paper to appear in the North American Actuarial Journal, the leading scientific publication of the Society. It announces the winners of the award, Mary R. Hardy for A Regime–Switching Model of Long-Term Stock Returns,and Phelim P. Boyle, Adam W. Kolkiewicz and Ken Seng Tan, for Valuation of the Reset Options Embedded in Some Equity–Linked Insurance Products.

Description: This Excel workbook contains the complete set of tables developed from the Society of Actuaries 2003 Pension Plan Termination and Retirement Study. Separate tabs are included for the Basic Age Table, Basic Service Table, Select & Ultimate Table, Small Plan Age Table, and Small Plan Service Table.

Description: Full version of Pension Section News, March 2000, Issue No. 42.