Description: This article provides a general introduction to JRI, including details about the types of research areas it highlights, an explanation of its prior review policy, current calls for papers, and its social media efforts.

Description: This report summarizes a study that estimates the total economic burden of the opioid crisis in the United States from 2015 through 2018 and projects future costs of the opioid epidemic for 2019.

Description: Ensuring employees retire with adequate benefits is an ever-growing challenge. During this webcast, we will highlight key insights from the fields of behavioral economics and data analytics that can be utilized to better equip employees for retirement. Areas of focus will include inherent biases that people exhibit and how employers can use these biases to design plan features that will nudge their employees towards making better decisions for their futures.

Description: This session will present results of the most recent SOA/LIMRA studies of variable and fixed-indexed annuity policyholder behavior including withdrawal behavior, guaranteed living benefit elections and surrender activity. Conducted annually since 2006, a discussion on the results of these studies show how they have changed over time, as well as areas where the analysis will need to change or expand. After that, the presenters will focus on dynamic lapse for hot money businesses, which is an important topic for fixed deferred annuity. Key takeaways from this area will include an understanding how to differentiate between hot money and warm money, the different formulas used in the industry, and how to adjust an asset portfolio to protect against the risks associated with hot money businesses.

Description: Discusses the market, demographic, and macroeconomic factors that affect actuaries' choices for the assumptions they use in the pricing and valuation of many insurance products.

Description: This report summarizes a study that estimates the total economic burden of the opioid crisis in the United States from 2015 through 2018 and projects future costs of the opioid epidemic for 2019.

Description: This report summarizes a study that estimates the total economic burden of the opioid crisis in the United States from 2015 through 2018 and projects future costs of the opioid epidemic for 2019.

Description: This research report on the effect of deflation or high inflation has six sections: 1. The first section provides background on inflation, describes some problems in measuring inflation, and explains some of its effects on an economy. 2. The second section reviews historical inflation rates. 3. The third section examines the effect of inflation or deflation on the property-liability and life insurance industries. 4. The fourth section proposes risk mitigation strategies for insurers to cope with either deflation or high inflation rates. 5. The fifth section describes a publicly available model that can be used to develop inflation/deflation projections under a regime switching format that can readily be adjusted to reflect current financial uncertainty. 6. The sixth section provides conclusions.

Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: From a simple mathematical model of the underlying economics, I first predicted this crisis in July of 2004. An economic dynamic relating very low interest rates to the structure of the demand curve in the housing market made this outcome foreseeable, indeed inevitable. The current crisis had a mathematical cause. Essay on the collapse of the housing bubble.