Description: Future mortality improvement has been a common assumption in life insurance and annuity pricing and forecasting for many years. However, experience over the last decade suggests this might be an assumption that merits reconsideration in the United States. This article will take a closer look at factors that impact mortality improvement trends and discuss why insurers may want to reevaluate product designs to better manage the associated mortality risk. We then introduce a product idea with this in mind, where premiums are based on a life expectancy index and insurers share the risk (and opportunity) or mortality improvement with policyholders.

Description: This article outlines the results of the appointed actuaries survey to gather information on current practices related to asset adequacy analysis performed in 2008 by the Financial Reporting Section Council.

Description: This paper applies the research in Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky to explain why sales of annuities lag sales of life insurance products. The author theorizes that life insurance is easier to sell because customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses, while potential annuity customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of gains. Kahneman and Tversky showed us that people are mostly risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. Purchase of an annuity or life product is a risky investment. Customers will find it easier to take the risk in the life insurance domain of losses than the annuity domain of gains. The author then proposes a hybrid life annuity product that might address both mortality and longevity risk in one product that would allow both products to be more competitive than stand-alone products.

Description: This research report, part of the Society of Actuaries [SOA} ‘Research Projects – Finance/Investment,’ is sponsored by the Society of Actuaries [SOA] Committee on Finance Research. This paper explores and summarizes current practices on the interest-rate risk of traditional life and health insurance products.

Description: This session at the SOA 1998 Maui I Spring Meeting discusses GAAP financial reporting in terms of the types of management information GAAP provides, how to interpret that information, and how to measure emerging experience versus expectations. Analysis of GAAP ROE and GAAP source of earnings is presented.

Description: In session 139PD of the Washington Annual Meeting panelists discuss emerging issues impacting the pricing of individual life and annuity products. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 23, No. 3.

Description: A research project with the Society of Actuaries on interest rate hedging on traditional life and health insurance.

Description: Profitability of traditional life and health products has long been considered less sensitive to changes in interest rates than profitability of universal life, SPDAs, or other “interest-sensitive” products. Consequently, traditional products have often been priced with a single deterministic interest scenario.

Description: Illustrative impacts on new business profitability of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for a variety of different life and annuity product types

Description: Full version of The Financial Reporter, Issue No. 70, September 2007.