Description: This paper recommends four criteria for measuring the adequacy of proposed funding policies.

Description: This session from the 1976 Winter SOA Meeting is a teaching session about the gain and loss analysis in pension actuarial and its essential part of the pension valuation process.

Description: In this article, the author talks about the pension environment and pension plans in Germany.

Description: 1974 SOA Meetings, Dallas and Montreal. This paper is the digest of discussions held at concurrent sessions of the referenced meeting. Topics covered: 1. CORPORATE FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT OF STOCK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES. 2. PENSION FUNDING ASSUMPTIONS. 3. DIRECTIONS AND GOALS OF ACTUARIAL RESEARCH. 4. VARIABLE LIFE DEVELOPMENTS. 5. LIFE INSURANCE AND CONSUMERISM. From Transactions of the Society of Actuaries 1974, Vol. 26, Pt.2D, No. 75 AB.

Description: Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This paper looks at issues with regard to long life and managing risk by individuals. It focuses on how structuring of payouts interacts with issues related to long life, and also discusses cash benefits and health-related benefits.

Description: This study explores whether public pension plans have contributed enough to reduce unfunded liabilities, absent other influences such as investment returns.

Description: Table constructed from lifetime long-term care cost studies conducted by P.J. Eric Stallard, ASA, FCA, MAAA, Center for Demographic Studies, Duke University.

Description: This is a summary of a new research paper entitled: “Determining Discount Rates Required to Fund Defined Benefit Plans” by John Turner and three other economists, which describes a new way to look at pension funding for ongoing plans that is a variant of using expected returns (currently used in public plans) that takes into account the risk that contributions will be needed in the future for this year’s benefit accruals.

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This paper proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.