Description: The impact of bond default risk on retirement benefit obligations describes how the probability default on a bond is similar to the probability of death for an annuitant. Bonds are used to cash flow match retirement obligations cash flows to funding from bond. Just as the probability of non-payment happens on the liability side, we can do the same with selected bonds. The end result may be an adjustment to the discount rates used.

Description: Up until recent past, the artificial intelligence portion of data science was looked upon cautiously due to its history of booms and flops . In the latest stream of events, major improvements have taken place in this field and now deep learning, the new leading front for Artificial Intelligence, presents a promising prospect for overcoming problems of big data.

Description: Analysis of the impact of disease progression and treatment on life expectancy provides perspective on the long term costs to the health care system of chronic medical conditions.

Description: Report on 2013 committee activities and a cumulative summary of key findings of the research. There ae many consistent themes. Description of major ongoing work project.

Description: This essay talks about gender differences that affect retirement security and reviews lessons from SOA research. It provides advice for women including traps to avoid. Issues consider include differences in life spans, widowhood, divorce, differences in care patterns and caregiving.

Description: We look in this article at the challenges which life insurance companies operating in a low interest environment have to face.

Description: This paper is a comment on the Tracker Plan, a concept for U.S. pension reform.

Description: This is a summary of topics discussed at the 1996 Bowles Symposium: “The Old Age Crisis: Actuarial Opportunities,” September 26-27, 1996, at Georgia State University, Atlanta.

Description: The financial sector should provide financial security and allocate capital well. As its preeminent professionals actuaries have particular responsibilities.

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.