Description: In the article in The Actuary, April 1972 the writer referred to the 15-year study of aging by Professor Edman Palmore of the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development of Duke University. His research indicated that work satisfaction was the best overall predictor of longevity and the second was overall happiness, reflecting a person's general satisfaction with his or her situation. The author discusses Work in America a paper written during the Nixon administration.

Description: The article explores options for defined-benefit retirement plan sponsors to transfer pension risk, focusing on recent trends in the United Kingdom.

Description: The paper gives an overview of the data that are available and discusses the problems encountered in estimating mortality rates at old ages in the UK. It describes some of the methodologies used to construct mortality rates at advanced ages for official life tables and recent work undertaken by the UK Government Actuary’s Department to construct a database of historical mortality rates for the United Kingdom going back to 1961. Mortality tables for ages 85 and above are provided for years 1961 - 2000 by gender. Finally, possible methods for projecting mortality at advanced ages are discussed.

Description: Discussion of three papers presented at Living to 100 and Beyond symposium. Papers discussed: 'Morality at Advanced Ages' by Virga, 'Factors Affecting Mortality in a Small Sample of Older Adults' by Jones, Kwon, Paterson, Cunningham, and Kovai, and 'Detection and Significance of Frailty in Elderly Insurance Applicants' by Pokorski. The first paper develops mortality tables from retired federal employee data.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 and Beyond symposium in January 2002. Discusses the impact of longer life spans on families, business, society, and programs to help support the elderly.

Description: Paper presented at Living to 100 symposium January 2002. Study describes the increase in life expectancy at birth in Japan, the emergence of centenarians, the trends in the number of deaths of centenarians, and the increase in maximum reported age at death. Death rates above the age of 100 in Japan since 1963 are computed and analyzed. This study completes and updates results presented in a previous study Robine and Saito, 200X.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 symposium, January 2002. This paper proposes a standard operating procedure for testing the Gompertz assumption using yearly age-specific mortality data, and the impacts of the data collection period and population sizes on the testing results are discussed.

Description: Elderly women living alone experience some of the highest poverty rates in the United States. One reason for their financial frailty is that they face more longevity risk than men. Existing financial products that can mitigate this risk are not attractive to many people. Can alternative vehicles for pooling longevity risk be developed outside the insurance market that would appeal to these individuals? This paper suggests some risk-pooling approaches and compares their effectiveness and viability.

Description: This paper focuses on the situation of women at high ages and the implications of longer life for women. This paper draws on and brings together work done by the Society of Actuaries in connection with the 2005 post-retirement risk survey, work from Social Security administration studies, U.S. government census data, WISER, the MetLife Mature Market Institute and papers funded by the Social Security research center.

Description: We propose an age-shift model to modify the LC model and deal with the problem of parameters. The proposed method attains smaller estimation errors with respect to mean absolute percentage error or mean square error. We also apply the proposed age-shift model to the mortality rates of these four countries to evaluate the longevity risk in annuity products by measuring life expectancy.