Description: Australia has conducted ten national censuses since World War II: in 1947, 1954, 1961 and at five-year intervals through 1996. Life tables have been prepared in connection with each of these censuses except the most recent one, for which data is still being collected.

Description: Multiple decrement theory traditionally is based on the assumption that competing causes of decrement are stochastically independent even though this assumption is usually not true in reality. This paper presents some fundamental results towards a dependent decrement theory. First, the author shows how to model dependence with copula functions, then he presents a theorem that characterizes the mathematical relationship between the crude and net probabilities when the decrements are dependent, and finally he applies the results by examining the effect of removing cancer from the United States population when cancer is correlated with the other causes of death. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994, VOL. 1.

Description: This article provides an an alternate, statistical approach, to graduation. Both single and multiple decrement models are considered and theoretical results are obtained for some specific mortality models. From: ACTUARIAL RESEARCH CLEARING HOUSE, 1979 VOL. 2.

Description: Equity-indexed annuities [EIA's] are the fastest growing annuity products. An appealing feature of an EIA to its holder is that it contains path-dependent options which allow the policyholder to participate in favorable investment performance while maintaining a minimum guarantee on the benefit level. Studying the valuation problem of path-dependent options enables us to provide needed information to insurance companies on the costs of these options as well as investment strategy for their portfolios. The martingale approach by Gerber and Shiu [1994, 1996] enables us to solve some valuation problems in option pricing without knowing deep results in stochastic calculus such as the Reflection Principle and Girsanov Theorem. What is needed is the Laplace transform of certain distributions known by actuaries. This paper shows how to use Gerber and Shiu's approach to compute two defective density functions related to double barrier hitting probabilities of a geometric Brownian motion. The approach used here is simple and straightforward, and purely analytical. The authors then apply the formulas to value some exotic options whose payoffs are contingent on barrier hitting time.

Description: This paper shows that Balucci hypothesis imposed on a survivorship function over a closed interval is dual to the uniform distribution of deaths hypothesis imposed on the survivorship function over the same interval.

Description: This paper considers the problem of parametric estimation of loss distributions in a very general context. It uses the minimum distance method with the Cramér-von Mises statistic as the particular choice of distance. The authors show how to compute the influence function for the estimator. They also use the influence function to obtain more information about the variance and the robustness of the estimator. They demonstrate, with an example, how much more resistant to contamination this estimator is compared with the more classical maximum likelihood estimator.

Description: In classical collective risk theory, the aggregate claims process is assumed to be compound Poisson. In this paper the authors examine a more general model for the aggregate claims process: processes with independent, stationary and non-negative increments. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1991, VOL. 1.

Description: The objective of this paper is to present and to apply a numerical method in the calculation of the minimal and maximal ultimate ruin probabilities in two risk models given some moment constraints on the individual claimsize distribution. An application of this optimization problem is to find the extremal lower and upper bounds of the ultimate ruin probabilities given those constraints. The paper considers the classical risk models with constant and variable premiums.

Description: This research paper presents two series formulas for the probability of eventual ruin derived by the operational calculus method. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1989 Vol. 1.

Description: Under Yaari's dual theory of risk, this paper determines the equilibrium separating contracts for high and low risks in a competitive insurance market, in which risks are defined only by their expected losses, that is, a high risk is a risk that has a greater expected loss than a low risk. The authors also determine the pooling equilibrium contract when insurers are assumed non-myopic. Utility theory generally predicts that optimal insurance indemnity payments are nonlinear functions of the underlying loss due to the nonlinearity of agents' utility functions. Under Yaari's dual theory, the authors show that under mild technical conditions the indemnity payment is a piecewise linear function of the loss, a common property of insurance coverages.