Description: Professional development opportunities from the Society of Actuaries.

Description: This article summarizes presentations given at the 1998 Bowles Symposium concerning the use of genetic testing in underwriting life insurance and the medical, legal and ethical issues that arise.

Description: A convergence of forces has obsolesced virtually every element of the traditional paradigm of the U.S. life insurance business - the products sold, who sells them, and how they are sold. This article documents the decline in life insurance ownership and sales, and emerging trends - with the market being bifurcated into service intensive vs. commodity.

Description: The Actuary Vol. 22, No. 3. This article discusses how the advantages of the General Agency system which existed prior to the 1970s have diminished materially. Therefore, European companies should be very cautious with any attempts to emulate the North American-type agency distribution system of the late 1980s.

Description: This article describes how option pricing theory can be used in everyday financial decision making, and provides examples applicable to the insurance industry.

Description: This article presents an overview of the viatical/life settlement business including the current pricing, regulatory, tax and investment considerations.

Description: This article is based on a workshop discussion at the October meeting of the Actuaries Club of New York on yearly price of protection and level price of protection calculation methods advocated by Dr. J. M. Belth for the purpose of comparing 2 life insurance policies.

Description: This article describes the effect of different valuation interest rates and levels of surplus on income tax paid by life insurance companies via Phase 1 of the Federal Income Tax Act of 1959.

Description: This article is a book review of Life Insurance Company Investment Activities, Huebner Foundation Lectures, edited by J. David Cummins, and published for the S.S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education by Richard D. Irwin, Inc. The author notes it has been 25 years since a similar work was published by the Huebner Foundation, and that the new book does a good job of capturing the many changes that have occurred in that time. The article summarizes the book’s discussion of various topics, including investment strategy, types of investments, the impact of inflation, and investment regulation.

Description: Addresses U.K. actuarial discussion regarding “maturity guarantees”, i.e., the reserves necessary to support promises contained in investment-linked contracts.