Description: Interest rates steadily declining ever since the Volcker Fed tackled inflation in the early eighties. Ten years of stimulating monetary policy brought new lows. We should have braced ourselves for a return to neutrality, but that concept remains elusive. We will explore structural issues that have brought rates to these low levels and the potential impacts on the insurance business.

Description: In the context of insurance economics, the PH-transform is justified through some basic postulates on market premiums. In this paper the PH-transform is applied to the present value random variable in life insurance and annuities. It provides an alternative to the commonly used equivalence principle in life insurance and annuities premium calculation. This research project is sponsored by a joint AERF/CKER Grant of the Society of Actuaries.

Description: Panelists opine on where we are in the economic cycle as well as where we are headed. One panelist describes in detail his company's economic scenario generator, nicknamed GEMS [TM]. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 71PD of the Boston Annual Meeting.

Description: The image campaign for the actuarial profession is described. From Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 30, No. 3.

Description: This article summarizes a recent revenue ruling concerning the insurance company qualification of an affiliate that reinsures retiree health benefits under an arrangement entered into by a VEBA.

Description: Health care is a complex market with a wide variety of stakeholders. These stakeholders have diverse business needs, requiring complicated data-driven decisions. The analytics and research supporting these decisions are often dependent on the availability of real-world data (RWD), which includes a wide variety of data capture technology and data reflecting treatment, clinical outcomes, and costs of health care in real treatment settings (e.g.,, outside of controlled clinical trials). The goal of this panel discussion is to explore how existing and emerging sources of RWD can enhance benefit design, improve risk assessment, influence treatment decisions, and advance the measurement of clinical, humanistic, and financial outcomes. The diverse speaker panel includes actuarial and non-actuarial perspectives, representing the pharmaceutical industry, a health-care services business, and academia. The panel will describe the decision-making that drives their individual needs to use RWD, identify current and developing RWD sources, provide examples of analyses using RWD, and discuss how emerging RWD may influence actuarial analytics and potentiate the development of new interdisciplinary methods and value drivers.

Description: Appendix G is the listing of participants from the Delphi Report. Please see the SOA website Research section for the full Delphi Study of Economic Variables Report and all of the appendices.

Description: A summary of Medicare reform and its effect on prescription drug coverage.

Description: Overview on current trends in medical practice impacting the LTC insurance business with a focus on dementia, risk stratification, and predictive modeling.

Description: Nonprofit ideas shares lessons from the field about how a better understanding of underserved consumers can lead to better product design.