Description: Users of statistical packages should be more aware of the influence that outlying data points can have on their statistical analyses. Robust procedures provide formal methods to spot these outliers and reduce their influence. While a few robust procedures are mentioned in this article, one is emphasized and it is motivated by maximum likelihood estimation to make it seem more natural. In this article, the author will try to provide some background, beginning with maximum likelihood estimation of one parameter, that will hopefully make robust estimation seem natural and rather easy.

Description: This paper explores the range of contribution policies allowable under various sets of rules, and then proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.

Description: This paper examines concepts from both financial economic and actuarial science as applied to defined benefit schemes using a simple discounted cash-flow framework as a reference point. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

Description: This is a concluding and encompassing part of our research on the project entitled \Weighted Premium Calculation Principles and Risk Capital Allocations, which has been supported by the Actuarial Education and Research Fund AERF and the Society of Actuaries Committee on Knowledge Extension Research CKER. We explore the concept of weighted distributions and their role in various phenomena occurring in insurance and finance. In particular, we relate weighted distributions to actuarial and economic premium calculation principles, and also to the capital asset pricing model CAPM. Imitating the latter, we propose a weighted insurance pricing model WIPM. Although general in formulation, we show that the WIPM can successfully be evaluated in a variety of situations, which we illustrate with a number of examples.

Description: The paper argues that Risks Evaluation at its core is a psychological process that can lead to the special type of chaos described in modern Chaos Theory. It will argue that quantification and scientific modeling does not exempt risk assessment from the potential for deep biases. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: In this paper, we introduce a family of leptokurtic symmetric distributions represented by the difference of two gamma variates. Properties of this family are discussed. The Laplace, sums of Laplace and normal distributions all arise as special cases of this family. We propose a two-step method for fitting data to this family. We develop a statistical test for goodness-of-fit and introduce a test of normality of the data. A simulation study is provided to illustrate the theory.

Description: This paper takes the position that it is possible to compute annual pension costs without computing liabilities first, or at all, even implicitly. Moreover, such an approach can be shown to have powerful advantages in stochastic financial environments. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

Description: The concept of transformed distributions is generalized in this paper. First the concepts of net premium intensity, loaded premium intensity and load generators arc introduced. Then transformed distributions are identified with premium intensity and hence the loaded premium is calculated from transformed distributions. Finally it is shown that this method of premimn calculation is arbitrage free and it incorporates the strengths of the utility approach.

Description: There have been continual advances in the modeling of financial series but most are aimed at the pricing of derivatives. Different criteria are needed for development of scenarios for risk management. Some recent methods will be reviewed with an eye on risk-management applications, including using the simulated method of moments to parameterize multifactor models, fractional differencing and other methods to model series with persistent autocorrelation, and models to flatten out the volatility smile, such as jump-diffusion models. These methods will be illustrated with applications to inflation, interest rates, equity prices and exchange rates.