Description: This article summarizes presentations given at the 1998 Bowles Symposium concerning the use of genetic testing in underwriting life insurance and the medical, legal and ethical issues that arise.

Description: Discussion of how to obtain tight upper and lower bounds on E[hX] for a given function h, and a random variable X with three known moments.

Description: In his original monograph on portfolio selection, Markowitz [1952] discusses the tradeoff between the mean and variance of a portfolio. Since then, especially recently, much attention has been focused on asymmetric distributions to minimize risks with given return goal for investors who have special skewness preferences. To address this issue, this paper extends Krokhmal et al. [2002]’s approach by adding CVaR-like constraints to the traditional portfolio optimization problem. The CVaR optimization technique has the advantage of reshaping either the left or right tail of a distribution while not significantly affecting the other. Specifically, this approach is used to manage the skewness of asset-liability portfolios of financial institutions. In addition, the CVaR-like constraints approach is compared with traditional Markowitz method and some other alternatives such as, the CVaR approach [directly optimize CVaR], the Boyle-Ding approach as well as the mean-absolute deviation [MAD] approach. Numerical analysis provides empirical support for the superiority of CVaR-like constraints approach in terms of skewness improvement of mean-variance portfolios.

Description: This article contains reviews of the following books published in 1987-1990: 1. 'Pension Age in a Changing Society' by Patrick Carroll, 2. 'Life Insurance Mathematics' by Hans U. Gerber, 3. 'A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750' by Anders Hald, 4. 'Medical Risks: Trends in Mortality by Age and Time Elapsed' by Edward A. Lew, 5. 'Canadian Handbook of Flexible Benefits' by Robert J. McKay, 6. 'Canadian Insurance Practices' by Franklin Reynolds, 7. 'On the Shoulders of Giants' edited by Lynn Arthur Steen, 8. 'The Value of Pensions in Divorce: What It Is and How to Use It' by Marvin Snyder, 9. 'Life Insurance Accounting' by Edward P. Brunner and Paul E. Heacock, 10. 'Duration Analysis: Managing Interest Rate Risk' by G.O. Bierwag, and 11. 'Actuarial Evidence: Valuing Past and Future Income' by Donald R. Anderson. Notices of other articles and publications are also included. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1990, Vol. 42.

Description: 1992 SOA Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. In this session on Single Premium Deferred Annuities, the panelists discussed the results of the 1992 Single Premium Deferred Annuity Persistency Study and they identified some additional research in the area of interest-sensitive cash-flow analysis.

Description: This is the abstract of a paper that considers a general two-country model of exchange rate dynamics in which interest rates are stochastic. Special cases of this model are also illustrated in which the, interest rates are constant in each country and when interest rates are Gaussian in each country. This model provides an important tool for actuaries dealing with global risk which includes valuation of currency derivatives [forwards, futures, options and swaps], frequency/severity claims model with exchange rate risk in the claim size, valuation of individual insurance contracts written in foreign currency, and valuation of general interest sensitive claims in foreign currency.

Description: This paper presents best upper and lower bounds on the expected value of an insurance payment under the terms of a contract written on a random loss with known moments. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1991, Vol. 43.

Description: Shows how to use personal information such as medical history, family characteristics, etc. in a logical statistical fashion for the purpose of modifying an existing mortality table to reflect the collected underwriting information.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to study mortality-based securities, such as mortality bonds and swaps, and to price the proposed mortality securities. The focus is on individual annuity data, although some of the modeling techniques could be applied to other lines of annuity or life insurance.