Description: John Ralfe's response to the Robert T. McCrory/John Bartel discussion of the article Reinventing Pension Actuarial Science by Lawrence Bader and Jeremy Gold. From The Pension Forum, January 2003, Volume 15, Issue No. 1.

Description: Comments by Ryan Labs Asset Management on paper by James J. Rizzo Krzysztof M. Ostaszewski Piotr Krekora.

Description: The author of this article notes that “valuing pension or long-term disability plans with Social Security offsets generally requires some assumptions about the future course of the wage base and benefit formula,” and “the usual approach is to select annual percentage increases for these two variables which relate reasonably and well to the valuation salary scale, and then to project Social Security on that basis.” The author goes on to discuss how the actuary and plan sponsor can be comfortable with a particular choice of parameters, given that “costs can be very sensitive to the Social Security projection and recent history offers little guidance.”

Description: Kevin Binder, chair of the Pension Section Research Team, shares a summary of two recently completed projects that are now posted on the SOA website.The first topic is on the drawing down of retirement savings and the second is on the valuation of pension plan embedded options. From Pension Section News, October 2011, Issue No. 75.

Description: Review of Fifty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Actuaries of the Civil Service Retirement System. The authors found it to be a concise well written report discussing a number of issues facing all pensions in an inflationary economy. Both the title and the dull format in the usual Government Printing Office style would seem to insure this document's instantaneous consignment to dead storage. However, behind the cover of this small pamphlet is a concise, well written report discussing-a-number of the issues facing not only federal pension programs at the present time, but all pensions in an inflationary economy. For example, several of the 11 pages devoted to the main report discuss the implications of static assumptions ignoring inflation as opposed to dynamic assumptions including inflation.

Description: This presentation was made at the 1975 Spring Cincinnati Joint Meeting of the Conference of Actuaries in Public Practice and Society of Actuaries. It discussed the following: how to choose the best pension assumptions and methods, how to arrive at interest assumptions, and the advantages of cost methods that reflect assumptions about new entrants and other changes in the group. 1975 Record Vol. 1, No. 3

Description: Frequently risk is portrayed as something to be avoided, especially in public retirement plans. This paper argues taking risk is likely the prudent choice.

Description: Discounted Value Returns: Actuarial Principles Applied to Performance Analysis. From The Pension Forum, August 2001, Volume 13, Issue No. 1.

Description: This article uses a Bayesian approach to persistency to explore pension cost projection variability. The analysis includes the specifications of the model and how the model might be used to generate confidence intervals for pension cost projections.

Description: This article is about the value of fringe benefits, specicifically of pension benefits earned while married in the event of divorce or marital dissolution. It centers around the assumptions which should be used to determine the present values and shows applicable equations to be used.