Description: This 1981 discussion session focuses on current trends in the investment of pension assets.

Description: Understanding U.S. defined-benefit plan annual funding notice definitions and what they are meant to represent is a key to understanding how “healthy” or “unhealthy” a pension plan is. This article offers a description of several types of funded status measurements and their applications under the rules mandated by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to fund private employer-sponsored defined-benefit pension plans.

Description: An update on the Capital Market Assumptions used for asset allocation maybe useful to actuaries given the parallels with the assumptions an actuary uses to measure plan obligations.

Description: Asia is experiencing changing demographic, social, and cultural tides which threaten to submerge existing retirement-pension systems.

Description: In order for actuaries to play a valuable role in the realm of enterprise risk management ERM, they must provide value-added advice and quantitative analyses. In this paper, the authors use stochastic simulation technology to present a risk metric for defined benefit pension plans that provides improved measures of the plan’s solvency and provides a tool for pension plan managers to determine the value of risk mitigation activities.

Description: Chairperson’s column discussing the state of the world today and how that influences investment strategies and describes to seminars the section sponsored to keep members apprised of changes.

Description: The investment risk taken by a pension fund comprises strategic risk and active risk. This paper discusses the relative merits of these two types of risk to the pension fund, possible rationales for the levels of strategic and active risk typically adopted mechanisms for capturing manager skill without taking on equity risk, and issues in setting liability-based benchmarks for investment managers

Description: July 2012 issue of (RL) Bond Market Watch

Description: RL Asset Liability Watch, September 2012 issue

Description: This article presents asset/liability matching, including techniques for pension plans. Application of techniques to stabilize expense and protect plan surplus against economic fluctuations will also be discussed. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 4b.