Description: On October 30, 2006, the UK government's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change made startling claims about the present value today of climate change effects predicted to emerge primarily 150 years or more in the future. The ensuing debate included challenges to and defenses of the particular methodology used and parameter values selected to perform the discounting of future values. Noticing an overlooked faux pas in the Stern Review, this presentation uncovers the likely motivation for choosing the most mystifying of the parameters values, and provides a lesson on the underpinnings of the basic tool of actuarial science.

Description: This is the abstract for the presentation on the effect of global warming on discounting methodology.

Description: From an interactive forum session at the 2001 Valuation Actuary Symposium, held in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, November 29-30, 2001 Discussion of the major financial reporting issues and concerns of senior actuaries in life insurance companies. Discussion focused cash flow testing methods and interpretation of results.

Description: The behavior of extreme paths in the usual stochastic interest rate models is not nearly so plausible as the behavior of their expected values and variances. This paper proposes a new class of models that deliver more plausible extreme paths while preserving the usual expected value and variance behavior. Along the way we derive the closed form solution for the traditional mean-reverting lognormal process, including the drift compensation.

Description: This is a panel discussion session from the 1981 SOA Spring Meeting on the relationship of product design and investment philosophy. From Record of Society of Actuaries 1981, Vol. 7, No. 1.

Description: This panel discussion session focuses on a proposal to modify the Standard Valuation Law involving statutory maximum valuation interest rates.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, Orlando. This session is about accounting models for actuarial reserves and related items for selected countries in the Far East, Europe, and Latin America.

Description: The article announces the 2011 Actuarial Research Conference and discusses the themes of the upcoming conference.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, Boston. This session is about management of multinational organizations from a home office perspective. It discussed cultural issues, regulatory issues, marketing issues, repatriation of profits, investment and currency risks.

Description: The series expansion of a probability density function, known to actuaries by Esscher's name and to statisticians as the saddlepoint approximation, typically gets integrated to approximate probability values under the density, with a location parameter in the expansion chosen to optimize convergence of the integrated series. We review the general form, the accuracy and the derivation of the Esscher approximation. Then we propose using related series expansions for the derivative of a probability density function to approximate the value of the point of maximum likelihood for the density. The key is to make the value of the location parameter an unknown and assume it to be the point of maximum likelihood, which leads to a tractable optimization problem to find its value.