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 paper deals with the policy reserves for future benefits that arise under retrospectively experience-rated group insurance policies. The reserves discussed are true policy-year reserves and should not be confused with the statutory rating refund liability, which represents the amount of the current policy year's dividend or experience rating refund earned between the last policy anniversary and December 31.From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1983, Vol. 35.

Description: Healthcare costs have been rising faster than general inflation for many years. Early models that predicted this past pattern projected healthcare expenditure growth that continued to outpace total expenditure growth leading to the fallacious position that the whole of the US economy would ultimately be consumed by healthcare. The Society of Actuaries' Pension Section and Health Section Research teams commissioned Professor Thomas E. Getzen of Temple University to construct a resource model for the projection of long term healthcare cost trends that includes capacity constraints to ensure the long-term projection is rational. The motivation for creation of the model was driven by its potential usage as a resource for the estimation of reportable liabilities for retiree healthcare benefits as specified under FAS 106 and GASB 45 accounting statements. This is a zip file containing the following: 1. A background paper on the creation of the health trend model, 2. The model, programmed in Microsoft Excel [xls format], that projects per-person expenditures and growth rates through 2099 using baseline assumptions, but also permits the flexibility for user–inputted alternative assumptions, and 3. Technical documentation providing transparency and support for the ultimate results.

Description: U.K. life insurers writing participating business are required by the Financial Services Authority to value their assets and liabilities on a market-consistent basis. The purpose of this paper is to: • Explain the valuation approach based on market-consistent values and its rationale. • Set out the issues faced by life insurers in implementing the regime. • Explain how insurers addressed these issues. • Explain the importance of the modeling techniques they used.

Description: This paper considers the question of whether or not the growth in the size of financial statements witnessed over the last several years has yielded an increase in the quality of disclosure around issues of financial risk and to what extent this disclosure is satisfying the perceived needs of readers of the financial statements, as represented by the investment analyst community. The question is addressed by presenting the results of research consisting of 1 the review and analysis of the disclosures addressing issues of financial risk contained within financial statements issued from 1999 to 2004 by 25 major insurance companies operating in the US and 2 the interviewing of 5 insurance industry analysts to understand their perceptions of what is good and bad about financial disclosure practices of life insurance companies.

Description: This paper presents a new insight into the mathematical structure of asset share-type calculations. Asset shares are interpreted as accumulations of insurance cash flows, which along with their related investment income, are treated as Stieltjes integrals. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1978, Vol. 30.

Description: This paper addresses the extension of the theory of life contingencies to a stochastic interest environment and its application to solvency valuation and surplus. A discussion of the paper follows. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1990, Vol. 42.

Description: The Smaller Insurance Company Section, the Committee on Life Insurance Research and the Product Development Section announce the release of a new report on the impact mortality credibility has on principle-based reserves.

Description: This paper describes a streamlined procedure for allocating investment income which permits the application of a single current investment-year interest rate, together with an averaged rollover rate, to an adjusted asset base to give essentially the same results as the traditional investment-year method. It also includes a discussion of the paper. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1976, Vol. 28.

Description: The principal purpose of this paper is to examine some of the factors that must be considered if the concept of investment generations is applied to the distribution of investment income within individual life insurance lines of business. It also includes a discussion of the paper. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1977, Vol. 29.