Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: Panel discussion on current issues, trends, and methodology in individual disability income insurance, including overinsurance, pricing, financial reporting, as well as efforts by professional associations to address these issues.

Description: The CAS is pleased to present its Research Paper, “Users’ Guide to Economic Scenario Generation in Property-Casualty Insurance”. Although there are cases in the literature about the use of economic scenario generators (ESGs) in the property casualty industry, they are far more commonly used for life insurance companies. Our hope is that this paper will serve as a comprehensive guide to the implementation of ESGs in the non-life space and spark interest in research into new applications of ESGs.

Description: The American Academy of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries (SOA) have joined resources to manage the economic scenario generators used in regulatory reserve and capital calculations.

Description: This year’s Life Meeting was unable to take place in person as planned in New York City. We are looking forward to the Life Meeting returning to New York City in 2024!

Description: This paper uses the ideal quasi-natural experiment of government-subsidized agricultural insurance program phased out in different regions of China since 2007 to study the effects and transmission mechanisms of the program on alleviating regional poverty using a multi-period Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach. Specifically, this paper identifies the causal effects on the incidence, depth and intensity of poverty among rural residents. The research has important policy implications. First, this paper uses the program as a case to provide a research paradigm to estimate effects of implementing policy instruments that combine markets and government mandates. Second, as common prosperity is now a government imperative, the research also provides insights into ways insurance can be used to hedge income risks, alleviate poverty and help achieve more equitable distribution. The paper has been published on WeChat account of Chinese Association of Actuaries on February 9, 2022. The full version has been published in CSSCI journal Insurance Research, issue 11, 2021.

Description: Gather with members and non-members in the China actuarial community to discuss recent topics and related issues in areas such as macroeconomic sharing, pension, investment, product strategy, and more.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that improves upon current multivariate statistical models for predicting the pre-payment rate of reverse mortgages, which are heavily data-driven. The prosposed model extends a semi-Markovian joint-life mortality model to incorporate three main termination modes of reverse mortgages: death, long-term care LTC entry, and non-health related termination.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Society of Actuaries, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2004, Vol. 1.