Description: This is the fourth paper on n-year roll forward reserve financing of public benefit systems, especially Old-Age, Survivors and disability Insurance OASDI, prepared by University of Michigan faculty and students. As the papers have developed, some ideas have been simplified, while others have become more complex. It is concluded that the theoretical model requires further attention. This research can be extended to expand our knowledge of OASDI financing and the applicability of n-year roll forward reserve financing.

Description: In recent years, insurance companies have been introducing saving products whose returns are linked to equity market performance. Equity-indexed annuities [EIA's] are one of the products of this kind. This paper is a study on the recent introduction and popularity growth of equity-indexed annuities. An index is considered which provides a minimum interest guarantee and a participation in the increase in an index.

Description: Traditional mean-variance method does not take skewness of the random rate of return into consideration. It only considers minimum variance for a given acceptable rate of return, which limited the probability of obtaining higher rate of return. If the skewness of return for the portfolio is incorporated into model of traditional approach, then the resulting non-linear programing model is not computational efficient, which certainly is complicated. On the other hand, possibilistic programming provides more efficient techniques to solve the imprecision nature of rate of return and also preserves the original linear model.

Description: Demography is a very exciting subject. With a simple mathematical model, students can project a country's population forward 25, 59, 75 even 100 years. This paper will focus on six ideas from demography. They all can be useful to an actuary, yet none of them would be considered at any length if the actuary didn’t study demography.

Description: American actuaries are increasingly involved in risk management. This paper presents an Overview of the role of the American actuary in risk management today, a book review of a remarkable new work by a philosopher of science, and a challenge to the reader.

Description: This is the abstract of the article 'A Proposed Unified Valuation System'. This article will briefly describe some analytical examples of a stochastic modeling of risk use to illustrate the S-curve approach to valuation, but more importantly describe key additional area of research and theory, which need to be developed. The focus of this presentation is an invitation for additional research to support a new approach to statutory valuation of life and health risk that can result in better management and regulatory information.

Description: These are the abstract and reference of the paper 'Bounds on Multiple Contingent Claims'. Lo considered the problem on bounding a European option on a single asset. He obtained an upper bound on the payoff of the European call in terms of the mean and variance of the underlying asset. In this talk, we extend Lo's result to the multi-asset case. Unlike the one asset case, the correlations between the assets play an important role and have to be taken into consideration.

Description: This note is labeled actuarial because it deals extensively with the force of interest, a concept which is characteristically of concern to the actuarial community. The authors’ personal point of view is that we should modify the basic definition of the compound interest.

Description: This paper builds a new risk model for a firm which is sensitive to its credit quality. A modified Jarrow, Lando and Turnball model [Markov Chain model] is used to model the credit rating. Recursive equations for finite time ruin probability and distribution of ruin time are derived. Coupled Volterra type integral equation systems for ultimate ruin probability, severity of ruin and joint distribution of surplus before and after ruin are also obtained. Some numerical results are included.

Description: Actuarial literature in the twenty-five years includes discussions of a well known inequality. Among the recent papers on various aspects of this classic result are those by Berin 1970, Olson 1975 and Sarason 1960. A standard method for achieving this inequality uses Jensen's inequality. This is the method used by Bowers, et al 1983. We will also employ this method in an attempt to learn about it.