Description: Opinion piece about when, how, and why actuaries need approximations.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: Commentary on practical observations resulting from constructing and running Economic Capital models. Possible standardization of assumptions and result interpretation are morphing even though use of E.C. models has now been around for years.

Description: Provides a simplified explanation of the modeling and statistical terms currently in use by the profession, and provides a list of publications worth reading in regards to complexity science plus a list of free software.

Description: Discusses the three complexity science sessions at the Annual Meeting that were sponsored by the Section.

Description: In this article, the author demonstrates how to compute interest on a short term credit transaction.

Description: Article from The Actuary, June 1983, volume no. 17, issue no. 6, that discusses eras in life contingencies theory. In the history of actuarial education on this continent, the subject of life contingencies has been successively presented to students in four major textbooks embracing almost exactly a century of instruction.

Description: This article lays conceptual foundations associated with projecting investment-related discretionary elements of various life insurance and annuity products. It outlines potential implementation approaches that may be appropriate when calculations are performed in a risk-neutral setting. The article concludes that crediting rates in risk-neutral models can be projected as in real-world models, except that the modeled provision for expected credit losses should be modified to equal real-world expected losses initially, but over the projection reflect management’s evolving expectation, moving ultimately to risk neutral expected losses.

Description: This paper suggests ways of presenting ideas from the theory of compound interest and actuarial mathematics using simulation on spreadsheets. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1997 Vol. 1.

Description: In this article, we talk to Lei Rao-Knight, FSA, Vice President and Actuary at Prudential Financial. Lei discusses her model development experience in the Modeling Center of Excellence.