Description: The editorial provides an overview of articles in this issue that explore and illustrate solutions to current retirement challenges.

Description: Panelists discuss different aspects of self-selection among Medicare options. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: Feature article discussing how insurers have reflected volatility in asset return assumptions when determining capital requirements, but have largely disregarded the impact of mortality volatility on their liability assumptions when performing stochastic analysis.

Description: The author uses football to demonstrate the axiom of downside risk, and how it can be applied in business situations when considering whether to use a conservative or aggressive approach.

Description: Investment Fallacies: The Misconceptions of Retirement Risks

Description: This session from the 1983 SOA Vancouver Meeting covers Term Insurance including mortality and persistency experience and the impact of lapsation on profitability, mortality assumptions specifically with regard to smoker/non-smoker and reinsurance. Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 9, No. 3

Description: Retirees and their advisors should construct diversified portfolios of retirement income, allocating among various retirement income classes that include Social Security, annuities, and systematic withdrawals from invested assets. This essay discusses the pros and cons of various retirement income generators and the issues with constructing retirement income portfolios.

Description: In this paper, we illustrate how to value American-style options using the Least-Squares Monte Carlo LSM approach proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz 2001 and investigate whether there exists an optimal regression complexity in the LSM framework for options pricing. In particular, we use the smoothing spline in the regression step, which allows us to control the regression complexity on a continuous scale with just one tuning parameter. Numerical results on American put options indicate that we need to use more than a linear regression, but as the regression becomes more complex, the accuracy of the LSM method quickly deteriorates. From 39th Actuarial Research Conference.

Description: There is nothing like a serious financial crisis to see if your risk management process works or not. The depth and breadth of the financial crisis in 2008 identified the strengths and more importantly exposed the weaknesses of the risk management process at Lincoln Financial. Enterprise Risk Management is tasked with understanding all the key risks inside a company and preparing the company to respond to those weaknesses. Lincoln Financial was exposed to multiple stress points as a result of the financial crisis and found themselves with insufficient resources to weather the storm. Ultimately the risk management process at Lincoln Financial was not fully capable of dealing with the depth and scope of the financial stress. Without access to government support it can be argued that Lincoln would not have survived the most profound financial crisis of the modern era. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.