Description: The Society of Actuaries Smaller Insurance Company Section, the Financial Reporting Section, and the Committee on Life Insurance Research are pleased to make available new research investigating simplified methods for determining reserves under VM-20.

Description: This session 30 PD of the New Orleans Annual Meeting discusses how several organizations, with representation from a number of countries, are currently drafting new standards to create uniformity across nations. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 3.

Description: The author refers to a separate article in this edition of Risks and Rewards, in which Babbel, Gold and Merrill provide an excellent exposition of three approaches to present-valuing a series of risky cash flows and provide several insights into the way modern finance theory deals with risk. The purpose of this article is to bring these insights to the world of insurance risks and view them in relation to existing actuarial techniques. The author also discusses direct discounting and the actuarial appraisal method and their consistency.