Description: Author compares in-depth statistical review of baseball team to the actuarial profession, Issue No. 47.

Description: From the 1960 Transactions Vol. 12 No. 32, this article is a discussion of the paper ‘A New Remarriage Table,’ by A. M. Niessen, which also appears in this volume of the Transactions. The contributors to the discussion provide their comments with respect to Mr. Niessen’s paper, which is based on his studies of widows’ remarriage rates.

Description: Matrix decomposition techniques are used to find main features of a dataset. These features can be used to describe the data or to find clusters of objects. The decompositions have problems when the matrices have missing data or are from different exposures. This article examines the issue and some papers dealing with it.

Description: A new project combining survey data from people across the country with data from John's Hopkins and the CDC on COVID cases and deaths. This project provides weekly data for individuals, businesses, and policy makers to understand which COVID mitigation efforts are in place in their area, how they are working, and how different COVID mitigation methods have been working in different parts of the country.

Description: Recent research from Financial Finesse introduces a viable way to forecast the potential return on investment (ROI) of workplace financial wellness programs.

Description: Milliman, Inc. recently conducted a survey of leading variable annuity insurers to better quantify the current dynamics of the GLB market. The scope of the Milliman survey included variable annuities that offered any type of GLB during calendar year 2004 and during the first quarter of 2005.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: A summary of the newsletter and a rundown of the table manager.

Description: A short article looking at the results from an annual assumption survey of VA writers with a focus on changes companies observed and planned to make due to COVID-19. In the article we discuss what companies should be considering as they approach the 2020 year end assumption setting and audit season.