Description: Over the past couple of years, the Society of Actuaries has altered radically its perception of its research role. An Issues management process has been put into place to identify and prioritize research activities. A management process has been established to approve research projects and to oversee progress. With such a structure In place a number of research projects have been initiated. The research activities of the SOA go well beyond new research projects. A revitalization of the experience studies and library activities also has occurred. In addition, several special projects which deserve mention have been undertaken. This article provides a status report on a list of research projects, experience studies, library activities and other projects. It also provides a chart showing the flow of a research project from conception to completion. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1991, Vol. 1.

Description: This paper is concerned with the evaluation of the common portfolio management strategy which consists of delegating to different managers portions of the assets to be invested. This practice is shown to be close to optimal under the realistic assumption that the private signals of the financial experts are positively correlated. This is accomplished by comparing this multi-manager approach to an optimal investment policy derived under full information, within the context of a standard normal returns/exponential utility market timing model.

Description: The two basic considerations in a pension plan valuation are the choice of actuarial cost methods and actuarial assumptions. This paper deals with the assumptions. The concern in this regard is what actuaries are doing and why. There are explicit criteria why particular assumptions are chosen, and these have often been discussed in the pension literature. However, there also are implicit criteria, which, while seldom discussed in the literature, can dominate the valuation. The goal of this paper is to quantify some of these criteria, and thereby provide a basis for further discussion and research.

Description: This paper presents a proof using the general mean value theorem that under specified conditions, the insurance premium for complete protection against a specified loss will decrease with increasing wealth. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994, Vol. 1.

Description: There are many investigations probing the relationship between health outcomes [such as mortality rate, fertility rate] and economic variables [such as rise in income] and other variables [such as level of education, availability of clean water]. Usually, these results are demonstrated using data from countries where economic conditions are improving over time along with health outcomes. This paper studies the links between health risks and the current economic conditions in Mexico where general mortality conditions improved during the period 1980-2000 but income fell.

Description: The projection methods used by the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary are important. The resulting projections are cited regularly by policy-makers, academics and others interested in the long-term financial solvency of the OASDI system. However, a complete description of this projection methodology that is vital for serious policy discussions is not available to the general public. This summary was constructed in connection with the Social Security Advisory Board's 1999 Technical Panel on Methods and Assumptions. A goal of the Methods and Modeling working group of the Technical Panel was to 'work to ensure that the projection methods used by the Office of the Chief Actuary become more public.' From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2000, Vol. 1.

Description: The Annual Reports of the Trustees, for the Social Security Trust Funds, are cornucopia of data. However, the major focus is on projections expressed as a percentage of payroll. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that additional measures - which would supplement, rather than replace the percentage of payroll data - should be examined to evaluate the projected effect of the cash benefits OASDI program.

Description: This paper investigates the use of models of dependent mortality for determining annuity values. We discuss a broad class of parametric models using a bivariate survivorship function called a copula. Using data from a large insurance company to illustrate our methods, we calculate maximum likelihood estimates to calibrate the rnodel.

Description: Abstract for a paper that develops links between credibility theory in actuarial science and longitudinal data models in statistics. The paper demonstrates that many additive credibility models can be expressed as special cases of the longitudinal data model.

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