Description: The purpose of this research is to analyze recent court cases that focused on excessive contributions to small defined benefit plans. The implications of the cases is important because it provides insight into appropriate paradigms for the funding of private retirement plans. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994, Vol. 1 .

Description: A study of the effect of random interest rates on life insurance programs and on annuities both certain and non-certain. This is done under several assumptions on the stochastic structure of the interest rates.

Description: This 1997 presentation from the 32nd Actuarial Research Conference is about the challenges of an aging population on retirement, Social Security, Medicare and long term care. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1998, Vol. 1.

Description: This paper establishes the need for home equity conversion schemes for the elderly. It then provides a review of literature pertinent to reverse mortgages paying particular attention to the different types of reverse mortgages and their associated risks. In an attempt to better quantify the general appreciation risk faced by financial institutions issuing reverse mortgages, ARIMA techniques are employed to model Canadian house prices in both current and real dollar terms.

Description: This note develops the optimality of the put option as a hedging strategy. For an investor who owns a stock, he can buy a put option to hedge against the downside risk of the stock price. In this short note, we ask two questions with the hedge strategy of the put option. First, whether the investor is better off with the hedging strategy? Second, if the investor is better off with the hedging strategy, whether it is the optimal hedging plan? Our result shows that in a risk averse world an investor will maximize his utility with buying the put option as a hedge strategy.

Description: This paper investigates nonparametric estimators of the distribution function that are based on mixtures of gamma distributions when we have a random sample from a continuous distribution function. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, VOL. 3.

Description: This paper builds on a risk theory model described by Tellenbach [1977]. That model involves Laplace-Stieltjes transforms which pose severe computational difficulties. This paper describes a simple algorithm which appears to work in the special case where the time span considered is reasonably small. The latter condition is typically met if the model refers to cumulative claims. A thorough mathematical treatment of the subject is not even attempted. Rather, the emphasis is on the computational aspect of the problem.

Description: The zeta distribution with regression parameters has been rarely used in statistics because of the difficulty of estimating the parameters by traditional maximum likelihood. This is the abstract of a paper that proposes an alternative method for estimating the parameters based on an iteratively reweighted least-squares algorithm.

Description: In a recent Society of Actuaries' regional meeting, there was a discussion on an age-old actuarial problem. Within the same company, should the return on equity ROE target vary by profit center depending upon the risk of the profit center? For example, should company management demand a different ROE from the Group Health line than from the Ordinary Life line?

Description: The purpose of this paper is to examine a special case of option pricing theory in which the insurance company promises the customer to exercise the option for him. This paper presents a simple formula for valuing the option. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1991, Vol.1.