Description: Examines historical life insurance and annuity policyholder mortality improvement trends and/or mortality improvement rates and how they compare to that of the general US and international populations. Discusses techniques for modeling and projecting future mortality improvements

Description: This paper is the final report in a project commissioned by the Society of Actuaries Social Security Committee. The paper considers a variety of possible risk classification factors that could be used in estimating the value of any mortality based benefit for retirees. As many countries consider mandatory individual retirement accounts as their answer to a secure Social Security system, the question arises as to whether all workers can get true 'market value' annuities when they retire. It is clear today that private sector life annuities are priced assuming that the applicant is healthy-very healthy. Very little underwriting or risk classification now exists in the individual annuity marketplace. This paper reviews 45 recent research papers that look at factors that affect mortality after retirement. In particular, factors that seem to be important in predicting retirement mortality include: age, gender, race and ethnicity, education, income, occupation, marital status, religion, health behaviors, smoking, alcohol, and obesity. For each factor, this paper gives highlights relative to the named factor of the impact expected from that variable as described in the 45 reviewed research papers.

Description: This report examines the mortality of Canadian pensioners subdivided by pension level, using data from the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Québec Pension Plan (QPP)

Description: This paper presents a general law of mortality that is equal to a mixture of Gompertz, Weibull, Inverse-Gompertz, and Inverse-Weibull survival functions.

Description: Provides white vs. black mortality rates based upon Social Security data for years 1984 - 1988, and separate tables based upon data from 'Health United States' for years 1983 - 1987 and data from 'Vital Statistics of the United States' for years 1983 - 1987.

Description: This article outlines a practical approach for setting mortality rates using credibility theory. It includes formulas that can easily be applied to determine how much credibility to assign to the results of a mortality experience study.

Description: This SOA report provides an overview and analysis of the mortality models, theories and trends contained in the papers presented at the past four international Living to 100 symposia.

Description: This paper was motivated in part by a desire to use, in a variety of classroom situations, some of the readily available statistics on mortality and related factors. A second aim was to illustrate certain statistical ideas, such as the relative merits of means and medians. However, the subject of racial differentials in mortality rates is of considerable intrinsic interest, which the analysis presented here only begins to address.

Description: This SOA report provides an overview and analysis of the mortality models, theories and trends contained in the papers presented at the past four international Living to 100 symposia.

Description: In this paper, mortality trends of males and females are examined from the beginnings of the human species until the present. Future projections are also made, and the implications of the widening gap in survival rates of women vs. men is discussed.