Description: Part 4 presents an alternate approach to obtaining the fair value of the public sector employer’s pension benefit liability.

Description: Part 5 addresses various purposes for measuring a public sector pension liability and which measures have the most practical usefulness.

Description: Introduction to the paper that documents the flaws of the current financial model.

Description: This paper describes the actuarial valuation method for pension plans, the formulas and assumptions used, and the way these assumptions might be chosen. A case study is presented. Followed by several discussion papers submitted

Description: Review of Fifty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Actuaries of the Civil Service Retirement System. The authors found it to be a concise well written report discussing a number of issues facing all pensions in an inflationary economy. Both the title and the dull format in the usual Government Printing Office style would seem to insure this document's instantaneous consignment to dead storage. However, behind the cover of this small pamphlet is a concise, well written report discussing-a-number of the issues facing not only federal pension programs at the present time, but all pensions in an inflationary economy. For example, several of the 11 pages devoted to the main report discuss the implications of static assumptions ignoring inflation as opposed to dynamic assumptions including inflation.

Description: An extension of a paper published in the 1952 Transactions by the same author, describing and classifying various funding methods for defined benefit pension plans. Followed by discussion papers submitted by several authors.

Description: Author response to Eric Friedman’s comments on ‘The Case for Stochastic Present Values,” by Dimitry Mindlin

Description: A new approach to computing annual pension costs, based on an open-group projection of the participant population for a number of years, was described in detail in a paper published in the 1975 Transactions, entitled 'The Forecast Valuation Method for Pension Plans.' That paper described the operation of such a cost method at the initial valuation date. This paper discusses several alternative approaches to projection valuation methods and also describes how costs should be computed at valuation dates after the first one. In addition, the author illustrates projected contributions and asset buildups under both traditional [closed-group] cost methods and projected [open-group] cost methods, for a number of years under a variety of assumptions as to the growth rate of the participant group. Projection valuation methods have not been described heretofore in sufficient detail to make it possible for actuaries to use them on a recurring basis or for the Internal Revenue Service to make a determination as to the acceptability of such approaches for computing tax-deductible pension plan contributions. It is the hope of the author that this paper will fill both of those gaps. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1977, Vol. 29.

Description: This paper addresses how to explain yearly fluctuations and computed pension cost in terms of deviations of actual from expected experience. It presents a method for deriving gain-an-loss analysis formulas directly from the valuation formulas and shows that the analysis is implicitly defined by the valuation formulas, rather than something which can be considered apart from them. This method can be used to attack both individual and aggregate cost methods and the development of exact analysis formulas provides not only the basis for computation but also valuable insight into the mechanisms by which cost methods adjust computed costs to reflect actual experience.

Description: This paper uses a Bayesian approach to persistency to explore retirement cost projection variability. The analysis is divided into two parts. In the first part a subjective population projection model is developed, based on a beta-binomial distribution for the number of participants persisting through a given age. Probability statements regarding such items as the number of participants at a given age and the distribution of retirees are developed. The second part shows how the model might be used to generate confidence intervals for retirement cost projections. Both the single-entry-age case and the multiple-entry-age case are considered. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1979, Vol. 31.