Description: This article highlights the research projects under review by the Research Policy Committee. It also invites submission of other projects with the caveat that ideas submitted without an offer of partial or complete funding will have a lower priority level.

Description: This paper presents the theory of immunization of investments to changes in interest rates and provides an extensive series of examples and formulas used in its implementation. Also presents some implications for investment behavior, product development, interest assumptions, valuation and adjusted earnings. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: This paper summarizes default experience on bonds from 1900 through 1987. Although the information is more extensive for publicly traded bonds, the paper includes some information on private placements, some of which is not otherwise available.

Description: A discussion about the possible future effects of AIDs/HIV on the life insurance industry.

Description: The final actuarial work of the renowned Briton, Frank Redington. was a series of essays called “The Flock and the Sheep.” They were reviewed here some months ago by Kenneth Stewart. These articles describe what could be characterized as the problem of incidence of earnings on investments inequities. While equities produce the greatest returns over a long time, they tend to have lower returns than debt for the first years of the investment.

Description: This article describes activities of the Board of Governors to strengthen the role of research within the SOA. The Board actions include approving two additional professional staff positions for the Research Department and including $150,000 in a Research Development Fund to serve as seed money for research projects.

Description: This panel discussion presented at the April 1976 SOA meeting in Washington D.C. presents opinions and information related to investment policy in a changing economy.

Description: The objectives of this paper are: 1. To show why scientific laws of mortality are preferable to the continued use of graduation techniques on mortality tables. 2. To develop a new theory leading to a new mathematical law of mortality that reduces to Gompertz's law as a first approximation. 3. To demonstrate an understanding of select mortality and produce a simple formula that is reasonably consistent with it. 4. To develop methods to test this and other similar formulas on various bodies of data to establish their validity and usefulness. 5. To discuss the meaning of the results and provide some examples of the use of the formula for purposes other than graduation. 6. To discuss extensions of the models. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 32.

Description: This discussion at the 1968 Annual Meeting covers insurance company investment issues including measurement of investment performance and models for measuring perfomance.

Description: The author describes immunization with a simple illustration requiring only high school algebra rather than the ordinary and stochastic calculus that has been applied to this subject. It illustrates that if you have three invesmtents with different durations, we can take some combination of any two of them to get the same duration as the third.