Description: This paper presents an approach to analyzing continuing care retirement community [CCRC] data, and demonstrates the methods using data from a large CCRC. It is assumed that residents make transitions among a number of states that represent the levels of care required by residents. There is randomness associated with both the transition times and the states entered at these times. The model is conveniently characterized in terms of transition intensity functions, which represent the instantaneous rates of transition between pairs of states.

Description: Sooner or later a casualty actuary is confronted by the question, Given a history of paid loss amounts by calendar year, what should reserves be? Often, it is not possible to accurately gather and analyze additional data within the time constraints for the reserving decision. The algebraic reserving method presented in this paper offers one approach to rapidly addressing this problem. The paper consists of four sections - General Considerations, Formulas, Examples, and Conclusion.

Description: The investment risk generated by a stochastic interest rate is recognized as often the greatest risk associated with a whole life or retirement policy. Recent research has investigated the mathematics of this risk when the interest rate follows a stochastic process and the time to death is considered to be random. In this paper we focus on the use of the zero coupon bond as an investment instrument to fund a whole life policy. It is unlikely that a company will entirely fund a particular single policy with a zero coupon bond.

Description: This paper presents a new approach for pricing insurance contracts. The approach is based both on economic and probabilistic arguments. The novel property of this paper is that the pricing argument is based on two factors determining the insurer's expected profit: the first one is the net revenue from selling insurance contracts and the second is the possible loss due to insolvency. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1997 Vol. 1.

Description: In this presentation, the authors develop a stochastic generator for the generation of scenarios of the S & P 500 index, dividend yield, consumer price index, and U.S. Treasury yields. They first create a set of 'stylized facts' for these series. These in-sample statistical models are themselves not suitable for generation of scenarios for decision making, but instead are additional stylized facts that assist in model development. The 'best' statistical model according to standard statistical model selection criteria can easily lead to a model that is highly unsuitable for generation of scenarios for decision making. The authors develop a stochastic generator that is suitable for decision making under uncertainty. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1997, Vol. 1.

Description: Actuaries and other managers of risk identify factors in modeling insurance risks because [i] they feel that these factors may cause the outcome of a risk, or [ii] that the factors can be managed, thus allowing analysts a degree of control over the system risk. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for quantifying the relative importance of a source of risk. The intent is that, with a quantitative measure of relative importance, risk managers will be able to sharpen their intuition about the relative importance of risks and be better custodians of financial security systems. This paper proposes a measure of relative importance that has its roots in both the statistics and economics literatures. The measure is intuitively appealing when assessing the effectiveness of basic risk management techniques including risk exchange, pooling and financial risk management. The risk measure is also shown to be useful in multivariate situations where several factors affect a risk simultaneously. The paper illustrates this usefulness by considering a pool of policies that is subject to mortality, the risk of a disaster that is common to all policies, and to a common investment environment.

Description: ['he purpose of this paper is to describe a possible Old-Age Social Security Program for Bangladesh, with financial projections through the year 2025.

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 paper compares percentile estimates of a large number of cash flow testing scenarios, where only a very small number fall in the ruin tail, by parametric and non-parametric methods.

Description: When a pension plan surplus reaches a high level, distributing some of it may be desirable. This article proposes a percentile-based criterion for how much to give. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, Volume 2000,Vol.1.