Description: Discusses bond-default history in the United States, implications for insurance-company asset determination, regulatory concerns about recent investing by insurance companies in low-grade bonds, valuation-actuary needs to consider in these cases, and another suggested method for modeling the C-1 Risk in the context of the valuation actuary's cash flow review. From the 1987 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 13, No. 3.

Description: In Volume LXXV of the Proceedings there appeared a paper entitled Risk Loads for Insurers by Feldblum. Confidence intervals for the betas in TABLE 4 [Profit Margins and Their Standard Deviations by Line of Business] of this paper can be generated using the assumption of underlying normal distributions. However, bootstrapping operational or not for interval estimates does not require the normality assumption. The method of operational bootstrapping does not use random numbers. The method for the 4-dimensional case, used to generate the interval estimates in the current paper, is a natural generalization of the bivariate case. I use operational bootstrapping to generate interval estimates for Betas shown in the TABLE 5.

Description: In the present paper, we propose and investigate a numerical method of computing the probability distribution of S. Inversion of the Laplace transform moment generating function is shown to be a better approach than the existing recursive method for find the distribution of sum of several independent random variables. In the continuous case, in many situations, numerical inversion needs to be used to compute the probability distribution function of the sum.

Description: A theoretical study of the interrelationship between the financial and insurance risk markets.

Description: A study of the effect of random interest rates on life insurance programs and on annuities both certain and non-certain. This is done under several assumptions on the stochastic structure of the interest rates.

Description: This dialogue discusses the history and purpose of section 811(a) and its historic role in the computation of life insurance company taxable income and, in particular, reserves.

Description: This article describes how there are many kinds of plans and arrangements under which qualified annuities are issued, and the rules governing them differ considerably.

Description: A discussion of the possible effort required and impacts resulting from the implementation of C3 Phase II for establishing risk-based capital for variable annuities. This article will describe practical considerations gleaned from actual valuation calculations recently performed by a consulting firm.

Description: A discussion of alternative meanings to “Best” in best estimate. When one is trying to estimate a result that is normally distributed, the mean, median and mode will all equal one another. However if the results are not normally distributed, different variance metrics will result in different “best” estimates. When different parts of a financial statement use different criteria for measuring best estimates and different processes for handling variances, the results can be volatile, unpredictable and perhaps unreasonable.

Description: From the Editor: This issue of Long-Term Care News attempts to address how LTC insurers manage investment risk and morbidity misestimation risks.