Description: The class involves a combination of presentations, class participation, in-class exercises and structured hands-on work with the MA BPT in small workgroups. Prior to this course, participants are expected to spend 3 to 10 hours preparing, depending on prior experience level.

Description: This is an abstract for the paper, Analysis of Costs for a Chronic Disease with Acute High Cost Episodes by Marjorie Rosenberg and Philip Farrell.

Description: Diabetes mellitus type 2 is an excellent model for assessing the setup of medical coverage in the U.S. health care system. It is a chronic disease that has genetic, behavioral and other medical causes, and causes many complications over the long term. From Financing Chronic Care Monograph, M-HB05-1.

Description: Expert discussion of several previous papers. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.

Description: The brief from the editor of Expanding Horizons for this essay was to give some personal reflections on how actuarial education and research influence actuarial practice.

Description: This project shows how to use agent-based models to simulate the behaviors of agents in complex health systems.

Description: This is a report on Phase 2 of a research project on the role of automated systems in life insurance underwriting. This paper discusses: 1. How and why companies are using automation to make underwriting decisions. 2. Its impact upon operational efficiency, sales, and retention. 3. The quality of risk selection produced by automated systems. 4. Cultural acceptance of increased automation in underwriting. 5. Challenges insurers must overcome to implement and maintain automated underwriting.

Description: This paper reports on the findings of a working group established in 1999 by the SOA's Finance Practice Area to look at how the insurance industry measures and monitors risk through risk position reporting. Also the working group established industry standard practices in risk position reporting and reported on a number of areas for possible improvement in such reporting.

Description: This is a compilation or risk management terms garnered from a survey of risk professionals supplemented with analysis of firm-level information on significant risks as reported in 10-K financial statements. Results indicate the existence of significance differences in terminology. The dominating pattern observed is a dichotomy between internal and external perceptions. Also observed is a difference between terms used by actuarial professionals and traditional risk managers.