Description: This is a final report to estimate the total economic cost of obesity. This study looks at the economic costs of obesity caused by increased need for medical care, and loss of economic productivity resulting from excess mortality and disability. The Society of Actuaries breaks out the economic cost of overweight versus obesity for the U.S. and for Canada.

Description: This is the abstract for the paper on what the vital features of an economic scenario generator are.

Description: Descriptions for proposed E&R sessions at the 2006 Spring SOA Meetings.

Description: This paper discusses the pricing of bond options and interest-sensitive cash flows by discrete state/time models such as binomial lattices. Current binomial models are faulty because the put-call parity relationship may not hold for all periods and there may exist negative interest rates. This paper presents a binomial model without such riskless arbitrage opportunities. This model allows the initial term structure of interest rates to be prescribed exogenously, so that the model price for each stream of fixed and certain cash flows is the market price.

Description: This paper, originally published in 1992 in the Transactions of Society of Actuaries Vol. 44, deals with a topic that is becoming increasingly important to actuaries in most fields of practice. “Without relying on formulas, this paper presents the important concepts underlying the theory of arbitrage-free pricing of interest-rate-contingent cash flows.” This paper, by James A. Tilley, won the 1992-93 Annual Prize, and the Halmstad Prize for 1992. The paper includes written discussion and the author’s review of the discussions.

Description: Reviews basic desirable features in an economic scenario generator. Discusses basics of model structure and validation process

Description: The academy generator is widely applied in actuarial practice. Initially confined to regulatory reserving, companies are increasingly using the AAA/SOA generator over an ever widening range of applications testing the limits of the academy generator's intended function. The session will give a brief overview of the academy generator and the asset classes it can be used to model. It will also analyze the statistical properties of the academy scenarios and discuss the scenarios relative to standard validation criterion. Some of the challenges that actuaries face in using this framework will be reviewed and options for addressing these challenges will be offered.

Description: Overview of Investment Section activity and vision ahead.

Description: This paper examines the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds. Catastrophe risk cannot be hedged by traditional securities. Therefore the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds requires an incomplete markets setting and this creates special difficulties in the pricing methodology. The paper briefly discusses the theory of equilibrium pricing and its relationship to the standard arbitrage-free valuation framework. Equilibrium pricing theory is used to develop a pricing method based on a model of the term structure of interest rates and a probability structure for the catastrophe risk. This pricing methodology can be used to assess the default spread on catastrophe risk bonds relative to traditional defaultable securities.

Description: Panelists discuss: [1] how they determine appropriate issuer and concentration limits in a below-investment-grade portfolio, [2] the best techniques for monitoring and managing exposures as they improve or deteriorate, and [3] opportunities for managing credit risk through synthetic structures and derivatives. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 55PD of the Boston Annual Meeting.