Description: Thomas B. Lowman's response to the article Reinventing Pension Actuarial Science by Lawrence Bader and Jeremy Gold. From The Pension Forum, January 2003, Volume 15, Issue No. 1.

Description: The Evolution Of Averaging Mechanics Used In The Actuarial Asset Valuation Method Of The New York City Retirement Systems. From The Pension Forum, August 2001, Volume 13, Issue No. 1.

Description: For most of the last forty years, corporate defined benefit pension plan assets have been managed to balance risk versus reward in more or less the same way that a risk averse individual would do with his own portfolio. Recently liability cognizant strategies have been developed, but these also attempt to balance risks and rewards. But pension plans are not individuals; they, much like their widely-held corporate sponsors, are pass-through institutions. The economics of such entities are found in the corporate finance literature rather than in the literature of portfolio choice. The corporate finance (and thus the pension finance) objective is economic value added rather than return for risk. Enterprise risk management is a corporate finance activity too and its goal should also be value added rather than return for risk. The intersection of enterprise risk management and pension finance leads to a value-based discipline with two startling results: • Widely-held corporations can increase shareholder value by hedging away their own systematic risk (e.g., CAPM β). • Very many corporate defined benefit pension plans should define their liabilities and manage their assets to develop a net short equity exposure (negative β).

Description: A review of the actuarial aspects of Cash Balance Retirement Plans and original actuarial research regarding the design and valuation of such plans.

Description: Articles and commentary on shared risk plans in Canada and the US explore the variety of designs, regulatory implications

Description: Full version of The Pension Forum, January 2003, Volume 14, Issue No. 2.

Description: Full version of Pension Section News, August 2005, Issue No. 59.

Description: This issue of The Retirement Forum presents the four prize-winning papers from the Retirement 20/20 Call for Models for Public Pension Plans Contest, which was conducted in 2018, and includes commentary from reviewers of these papers and replies from the authors.

Description: Evaluate the potential for target benefit plan designs across the full spectrum of defined benefit to defined contribution to provide more flexibility in benefit design while considering regulatory implications.

Description: This article addresses the role of pension risk management in the context of corporate risk management and how pension risk management strategies might optimally be implemented to increase the probability that pension benefits can be financed from plan assess and that, when and if required, unexpected increases in corporate contributions can be made without financial discomfort to the firm.