Description: This paper presents recent trends in obesity prevalence in significant population segments, including overall effects by age, gender and certain racial and ethnic groups, and discusses the ways in which obesity can influence mortality in each of these segments. It provides a synthesis of reported mortality experience relating to these behaviors by risk factors and diseases that will affect any mortality projection.

Description: Abstracts from all presentations at the 41st Actuarial Research Conference.

Description: Public policy makers acknowledge that there exist significant tax incentives for the use of Registered/Qualified Pension Plans and RRSP's/lRA's. This is the abstract of a paper that first analyzes these tax advantages as to the component source, i.e., how much of the advantage can be attributed to the tax deductibility of contributions and how much is because of the non-taxation of the investment income until taken. The paper then attempts to determine and illustrate whether or not these elements of tax assistance should be viewed as tax deferral or tax waiver. The analysis shows that any tax advantages associated with the deductibility of contributions is only tax deferral. However, the paper proves that there is a permanent loss to the taxpayers associated with the non-taxation of earned investment income until taken which should be viewed as a tax subsidy or tax waiver. The paper ends with a short discussion of the public policy issues raised by these findings. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994, Vol. 1.

Description: The abstract for the paper Improving Pension Funding: What's in It for me?

Description: This is the abstract of a paper that presents a model for examining the effect of various relationships between mortality rates and lapse rates on the mortality experience of a cohort of insured lives. It takes an individual approach rather than the aggregate approach used in traditional methods of analyzing selective lapsation. The model assumes that insured lives are healthy at policy issue, but may later move to an impaired state from which the lapse rate is zero. Associated with each insured is an unobservable 'risk level' random variable, which reflects the heterogeneity of the insured group. Individual mortality and lapse rates are functions of the risk level. A numerical illustration provides some interesting results obtained using this model.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that measures the magnitude of the systematic bias, found when using the Lee-Carter model for mortality prediction, using the bootstrap method and also provides suggestions on how to correct the bias.

Description: This excerpt from the 2001 Annual Report of the PBGC provides greater detail concerning the valuation of future benefits than is presented in the PBGC's annual report.

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.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that derives a number of analytic results for GMDB ratchet options.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that investigates how to apply a stochastic mortality model in the presence of missing data, using 'multiple imputation'.