Description: This literature guide concentrates on references that relate to U.S. annuities. Only a few sources pertain to Canadian annuities. Although similarities exist in product design between U.S. and Canadian annuities, regulation and taxation are different. This guide also focuses primarily on areas that are specific to the subject of annuities and touches upon related issues such as investments and pensions more lightly.

Description: The purpose of the present paper is to propose a family of sex-year-of-birth tables which may be used in place of The Annuity Table for 1940 with Projection. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1950, Vol. 2, No. 4.

Description: The article analyzes Private Letter Ruling 202031008, which considers how Internal Revenue Code sections 72(q) and (u) apply to an annuity contract issued to a trust. In particular, the Ruling interprets the terms “taxpayer,” “holder” and “held by” in those Code sections in situations where a non-qualified deferred annuity contract is issued to a grantor trust or a non-grantor trust. The Ruling’s analysis and conclusions differ in some respects depending on which of these types of trusts is involved. In addition, although the Ruling does not address sections 72(s) or 72(e)(4)(C), the Ruling has potential implications under those provisions because they also use the term “holder” and “holds,” respectively.

Description: Panelists at this session of the SOA 2003 Washington, DC Spring Meeting discuss how changes in interest rates affect the assets and liabilities of a life insurance company and what a company can do to prepare. This session examines historical trends in interest rates and how companies have reacted to both sudden and gradual changes.

Description: This article discusses the proper slope of mortality tables, especially at the high attained ages.

Description: This discussion at the 1968 Philadelphia Regional Meeting focuses on issues for smaller companies including expense analysis, adjusted earnings, variable annuities, agency operations, and interim financial statements.

Description: This article examines how the choice of the rebalancing frequency in a variable annuity hedging program impacts hedging.

Description: Chairperson’s column describing activities the Product Development section has undertaken to date.

Description: Annuities are presenting ever-greater risks for the direct writers: • Variable annuities with guaranteed minimum and enhanced death benefits and income benefits • Fixed annuities with multi-year rate guarantees are capital intensive • In-force structured settlements have asset portfolios with declining investment yields • The impact to the payout annuity market from lengthening life expectancies From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 3, Session 146 PD of the New Orleans Annual Meeting

Description: We devise an approach, using tobit models for modeling annuity lapse rates. The approach is based on data provided by the Society of Actuaries’ Risk Management Task Force. Kim [2005a] models annuity lapse rates using a logit model and the same US data (he also used Korean data separately). We find that the tobit model is a more than suitable approach for all levels of the explanatory variables including interest rates, unemployment rates, and GDP growth rates. Specifically, policyholder behavior in the tail of the distribution of lapse rates is explained as well as it is in the normal range of lapse rates.