Description: This meeting session, which occurred at the June 1980 SOA meeting in San Deigo, covered economic assumptions for pension plans. Topics included: 1. How should an Inflation Assumption be chosen? 2. Who should and can be involved in the process? 3. What Economic Assumptions are used for Social Security Canadian and U. S. projections? 4. What is the future of productivity and general wage increases? 5. How are Turnover and Retirement Age Assumptions related to Economic assumptions? 6. Are actuaries using variable or indexed Economic Assumptions? How are they doing it? 7. Should Economic Assumptions vary by plan size? By Benefit design? By valuation method? By investment strategy?, and 8. How should the assumptions be communicated to the plan sponsor? From Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 6, No. 3.

Description: This paper examines some of the methods used to determine the value of the assets held by a pension fund and used in actuarial valuations to determine the required contributions for a pension plan. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1968, Vol. 20, Pt. 1, No. 58.

Description: This paper addresses how to explain yearly fluctuations and computed pension cost in terms of deviations of actual from expected experience. It presents a method for deriving gain-an-loss analysis formulas directly from the valuation formulas and shows that the analysis is implicitly defined by the valuation formulas, rather than something which can be considered apart from them. This method can be used to attack both individual and aggregate cost methods and the development of exact analysis formulas provides not only the basis for computation but also valuable insight into the mechanisms by which cost methods adjust computed costs to reflect actual experience.

Description: Survey of Asset Valuation Methods for Defined Benefit Pension Plans. From The Pension Forum, August 2001, Volume 13, Issue No. 1

Description: This is a research project on possible replacement indices for the 30 year treasury rates used to value current liability for defined benefit pension plans in the US.

Description: Discussant comments by Ryan Labs Asset Management on paper “Actuarial Methods and Public Pension Funding Objective: An Empirical Examination,” by Norman L. Jones and Brian B. Murphy and Paul Zorn

Description: The Retirement Plans Experience Committee of the Society of Actuaries (RPEC) is pleased to present this annual update to the RPEC_2014 model and its corresponding mortality improvement scales. This new version of the model reflects historical U.S. population mortality experience through 2018. For clarity, the updated mortality improvement scale based on this 2020 version of the model is called Scale MP-2020. The Scale MP-2020 Report has been posted below along with an Excel version of Scale MP-2020.

Description: This paper attempts to reduce several variables to their bare minimum and to investigate how the cost of vesting depends upon those few that remain. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1972, Vol. 24, Pt. 1, No. 70.

Description: This paper deals with the selection of appropriate interest and inflation assumptions, which is one of the most important considerations in the valuation of a defined benefit pension plan. The paper begins by describing a simplified model in which the only important consideration is the selection of an appropriate differential between interest and inflation assumptions. The discussion then considers some situations that might lead the actuary to attempt to select a realistic level of interest and inflation assumptions, in addition to an appropriate differential. The author's conclusion is that in some situations the absolute level of the interest and inflation assumptions can be all but meaningless, and the differential between the two assumptions is the important factor. In other situations the use of this technique will produce serious inaccuracies in the valuation results. As always, the actuary must analyze each situation in order to determine which of the available techniques will produce the best results with the least effort, given the degree of accuracy required. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1976, Vol. 28.

Description: This paper describes the actuarial valuation method for pension plans, the formulas and assumptions used, and the way these assumptions might be chosen. A case study is presented. Followed by several discussion papers submitted