Description: The purpose of this paper is to identify the changes in the structure and composition of families and to discuss the implications of those changes for Social Security reform.

Description: This paper discusses the reasons for the trend toward phased retirement and looks at the legal and actuarial aspects of phased retirement as they apply to a simple defined-benefit plan.

Description: This paper explains how legal reforms related to annuities have decreased the popularity of annuities among plan sponsors, and then describes how a proposal for a federal charter option for life insurance companies could hold some promise for persuading plan sponsors to put annuities back into savings plans.

Description: Presented at January 2011 Living to 100 Symposium. This study explores the effects of parental age at a person's birth and the month of birth on chances of survival to age 100.

Description: Discussion of Living to 100 Session 6A: Projection and Statistical Modeling of Mortality at Late Age

Description: This paper presents a different approach to measuring Health Expectancy, especially as it relates to the elderly population. This new actuarial approach is described and numerous examples are given.

Description: Estimation of hazard rates at extremely old ages poses serious challenges to researchers: 1 The observed mortality deceleration may be at least partially an artifact of mixing different birth cohorts with different mortality heterogeneity effect 2 Standard assumptions of hazard rate estimates may be invalid when risk of death is extremely high at old ages 3 Ages of very old people may be exaggerated. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, which gives an opportunity to resolve the first two problems by compiling data for more homogeneous single-year birth cohorts with hazard rates measured at narrow monthly age intervals. Possible ways of resolving the third problem of hazard rate estimation were elaborated.

Description: This paper presents recent trends in obesity prevalence in significant population segments, including overall effects by age, gender and certain racial and ethnic groups, and discusses the ways in which obesity can influence mortality in each of these segments. It provides a synthesis of reported mortality experience relating to these behaviors by risk factors and diseases that will affect any mortality projection.

Description: In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of the Lee-Carter mortality index parameter kt. Specifically, we perform statistical hypothesis tests to examine whether the mortality indexes for Canada, England and Wales and the United States are best described by stochastic trends difference stationary models or deterministic trends trend stationary models. The empirical results favor broken-trend stationary models over difference stationary models, which are used in most previous applications of the Lee-Carter method. The results also give strong statistical evidence that the rates of mortality decline for the three populations have significantly accelerated in mid-1970s.

Description: Recent trends in mortality suggest that future gains in life expectancy will occur after age 80. This fact stresses the need and the importance to obtain precise measures of mortality at the highest ages, which are always subject to uncertainty due to misreporting of age at death.