Description: Join us for this webcast that focuses on case studies covering the ethical challenges and dilemmas that pension actuaries are currently facing. Participate in an interactive opportunity for audience members, as interaction is highly encouraged.

Description: How do unpredictable short-term mortality shocks due to the Coronavirus impact assumptions for pension valuations? What impact does this have in reviewing a plan's experience and can an actuary justify making adjustments? What portions of the population were most impacted by COVID-19? Find out all this and more during this discussion. This webcast will cover: Current research relating to COVID-19 mortality statistics The MP-2020 improvement scale and the MIM-2021 framework Perspectives on emerging longevity trends

Description: The emergence of technology to advance data visualization has helped uncover hidden insights in our data that was previously difficult to do. Designing engaging charts and crafting gripping stories through visualization has never been easier. This session will focus on understanding the fundamentals and considerations when deploying data visualization and selecting the best data visualization tool. Additionally, the course will provide an example of creating advanced data visualizations using Power BI.

Description: Explore how certain actuarial roles should be reserved under defined benefit plans for more than 50 years during the Reserved Roles for Actuaries in Defined Contribution Plans webcast. This online event will be focused on actuaries and defined contribution (DC) plan actuaries and how they have been spotlighted by the pension industry due to their roles. Join us to discover which roles under DC plans could be reserved for actuaries by plan sponsors or through legislation.

Description: Discuss interaction between defined benefit (DB) plans and defined contribution (DC) plans. Hear more about the impact of DB plans on DC plan design and vice versa. Learn about the differences in DB and DC plan governance and cross-over opportunities between these plan solutions.

Description: This article provides a perspective on the SOA’s Aging and Retirement research reports, and on the types of research that are included. The SOA does a lot of research on different retirement topics, and many people are not aware of the scope of this work. This article offers an overview of the big picture as we think about the future. The article describes longer-term challenges to the US retirement system and recent developments that have affected the system and created uncertainty. It provides an overview of what individuals have said about retirement and their view of post-retirement risks and planning in a variety of consumer research studies. It then reviews some of the research and provides information on summary reports which provide insight on the findings from multiple related research reports. It also provides information about consumer education and what is currently available and in process. It then focuses on how the SOA is helping retirement professionals understand current and expected change and discusses areas of uncertainty as we help those we serve deal with change.

Description: Mortality Model Selection and Combination in RAlternative approaches for selecting mortality models and forecasting mortality have been proposed. The usual practice is to base mortality forecasts on a single mortality model selected using in-sample goodness-of-fit measures. However, cross-validation and other alternative out-of-sample measures are increasingly being used in model selection, and model combination methods are becoming a common alternative to using a single mortality model. Such methods combine predictions from multiple mortality models to reduce model choice uncertainty and improve forecast accuracy. Explore techniques to select and combine mortality models using the freely available open source R package CoMoMo (https://github.com/kessysalvatory/CoMoMo), which extends the widely used R package StMoMo (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=StMoMo). We will use data for the USA and other countries to discuss and demonstrate four different model combination approaches including simple model averaging, Bayesian model averaging, model confidence set, and stacked regression ensembles.

Description: "Living to 100 in the time of COVID-19: A Study of Late –Life Mortality Trajectories, Leonid A. Gavrilov, Ph.D., Natalia S. Gavrilova, Ph.D., Academic Research Centers, NORC at the University of Chicago Swedish Mortality Does Not Decelerate in Recent Cohorts, or Does it? – Roland Rau, Ph. D., Professor, University of Rostock & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Marcus Ebeling, Ph.D., Karin Modig, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Anders Ahlbom, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm Sweden; Kai Kaufhold, Aktuar DAV, Ad Res Advanced Reinsurance Services GmbH, Cologne, Germany; Annika Ziegler, Lukas Stake, Hochschule Koblenz & Ad Res, Germany"

Description: How does retirement preparedness in the U.S. vary across racial/ethnic groups? This report compiles and analyzes a wide variety of works that look at this this question from specific questions. The result provides a broader perspective through comparison of seven metrics tracked from 2012 to 2021.