Description: This article is the final installment of our three-part series on economic scenario generators (“ESGs”). Part I and II were published in the November 2019 and August 2020 issues of The Modeling Platform. Part III contextualizes the framework for selecting, building, and validating ESGs and focuses on the Academy Interest Rate Generator (“AIRG”), the most commonly used real-world ESG for US actuaries

Description: This article poses the question, why doesn't the teaching of life contingencies start with the premise that the rate of investment income is a random process in a similar manner to the random nature of the time until death? The article suggests some methods for doing so.

Description: This article, with some humor, describes a movement known as “econophysics” of physicists modeling economic systems, including capital markets, using techniques and concepts developed in studying the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of complex systems. A version of this article appeared in The Actuary UK in August 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Description: This article is the first installment of a three-part series that aims to provide an overview of ESGs and will focus on the general motivation for stochastic modeling, its advantages and its limitations. Future articles will further break down the key factors of ESGs and the application of these factors to better understand the Academy Interest Rate Generator (AIRG).

Description: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the method of Lagrange multipliers complete with simple examples. The author suggests that this methodology is ideally suited to the investigation of minimum variance plans. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1987 Vol. 1.

Description: A review of 'Life Contingencies' by Alistair Neill, to be used as a textbook for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries examinations.

Description: The article discusses the investment models of The Mutual Pension Insurance Company Ilmarinen, one of the companies managing the statutory employment pension in Finland. The parts are: financial time series data management, time series analysis programs, investment simulation models and portfolio optimization models.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that considers the identification problem for age-period-cohort models for a class of non-trapezoidal index sets.

Description: The author summaries several reports from the IBM Symposium on operations research techniques and their future outlook 1968.