Description: Summary of the July, 2013 newsletter with an executive overview of each article.

Description: This article talks about the new onsite clinic at Hewitt and how it benefits employees and employers.

Description: The Behavioral Finance subgroup of the Health Section will be publishing a series of literature reviews in Health Watch. This is the first review of three in the series. The reviewed article describes an attempt to place an econometric value on consumers’ preferences between broad and narrow networks.

Description: This essay advocates that the transition from DB to DC plans won't be complete until plan sponsors offer programs of retirement income in their DC plans. The essay discusses the relevant actuarial and behavioral issues.

Description: This article describes methodologies for detection and deterrence of Medicare fraud. It also describes the validation of PRIDIT for fraud detection in Medicare.

Description: How assumptions like market returns and variable like saving rate should be incorporated into sound financial planning. How to analyze retirement readiness.

Description: Public DB plans have fatal designs such as basing benefits on a few years of earnings. Redesigning DB to be similar to SS will alleviate solvency challenges.

Description: This paper will focus on default distributions and why they are important.

Description: The is the abstract for a paper that discusses retirement planning information and the signals it provides. It focuses on the issue of communicating lump sum versus income benefits. It discusses challenges in communicating income benefits and provides some alternatives.

Description: Many risk management decisions involve the timing of implementing risk strategies. The cost of hedging, capital raising and securitization changes with the economic environment. The timing of de-risking and investment in new risk management functions affect the cost and benefit of these projects as well. Like investment timing, it is important to consider the timing in risk management decisions to maximize the gain of risk management projects. This paper discusses methods of determining the appropriate timing of implementing a risk management strategy or investing in risk management projects. It explains the human biases that may lead to inferior timing decisions. It also covers the costs and benefits of risk management projects and the impact of new information on the decision-making process. Timing considerations for financial risk hedging, insurance risk hedging and investment in new risk management projects are explained. Factors used for timing decisions include economic conditions, market volatility, credit rating, borrowing cost, capital adequacy and financial resources.