Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

Description: The author's asserts that when estimating life expectancy, care should be taken to account for how trends in mortality can change over time change over time and that by assuming they remain constant, one can underestimate life expectancy and therefore undervalue annuity products.

Description: We apply grouped functional time series forecasting methods to produce point forecasts of mortality rates at older ages and price fixed-term annuities.

Description: This paper first derives the fair participation rate based on a fair value of the equity-indexed annuity EIA. Then using risk measures, a new participation rate is obtained, based on the tail loading of the hedging error distribution. Risk management strategies reducing risk related to the hedging error are also presented. A detailed numerical analysis is performed for a point-to-point EIA.

Description: Discussion of LTC insurance product developments being spurred by recent demographic and regulatory trends, especially combination products such as LTC benefits with disability income, annuities, and life insurance. Several viable product styles are considered, along with the pros and cons of each.

Description: This paper presents a generalized profits released model which resolves the difficulties of the traditional analysis posed by products that have fluctuating profits and losses over time or have no initial investment. Discussions of the paper are included.

Description: This article delves into a new line of statistical thinking of the author, that may be useful for product development actuaries. The key concept is how product design can produce products that diversify quickly, meaning that the company can be confident of a profitable product line, based on fewer sales than might be true for other designs.

Description: This paper applies GPUs and deep learning to achieve orders of magnitude performance improvement in the valuation of large portfolios of variable annuities.

Description: This article addresses the issues of short-term volatility, the non-equivalency of traders and, how product development is being impacted by market consistency.