Description: Introduction to option pricing, with special attention to issues in applying these tools to price equity-linked insurance products. Clear, accessible explanation of key results of mathematical finance including risk-neutral valuation.

Description: Decomposes guaranteed minimum maturity benefit option into a basket of components, and values each component with both a Black-Scholes model and a regime-switching GARCH model. Performs sensitivity analysis on dynamic lapse assumption.

Description: This articles describes the multi-pillar system of 1 pay as you go and 2 individual capital accounts to fund public pension plans which exists in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Description: The selection of a discount rate is one of the most important assumptions for the calculations of present values. The paper presents the basic properties of the key measurements of investment returns and the discount rates associated with these measurements.

Description: Provides an example of using numerical methods to estimate the credit risk spread curve from sparse historical data. Applies Baysian and Normal models. Uses Gibbs sampling and Rejection sampling methods for multivariate estimates. Critically evaluates these techniques.

Description: Feature article discussing whether or not genetic algorithms can be used by actuaries.

Description: Part one of a two-part article, to be contined in Feb 2014. Provides useful rules of thumb for breaking out investment return into components of periodic arithmetic return, geometric return, the volatility of returns and the correlation of returns by asset class. Develops and relates these axiomatic concepts into rules of thumb for estimating quantiles of a range of stochastic returns.

Description: Summarizes the state of US government balance sheet and defends the view that inflation will not rise sharply in the next few years.

Description: By necessity, attributions of financial processes require approximations. Tools used for approximations include Aumann-Shapley, time step, step-through, average step-through, partial derivative, and average partial derivative. Significantly non-linear paths can cause problems during attribution. Time (theta) and market factors must be handled concurrently. Typically contractual factors can be handled separately. Average Step-Through, Aumann-Shapley and Aumann-Shapley-3 points perform the best given the same time period. Attribution should be done with fairly small time steps as opposed to using a lot of points in the Aumann-Shapley calculation, but using Aumann-Shapley-3 points as a last step has some advantages.

Description: Provides summary of qualitative factors in the current fiscal, economic and political environment that could lead to higher inflation.