Description: Study of the impact of IRS proposed mortality tables on private sector pension plan costs, including liabilities, contributions and PBGC premiums.

Description: This study explores whether public pension plans have contributed enough to reduce unfunded liabilities, absent other influences such as investment returns.

Description: Metrics for measuring pension plan contributions against benchmarks for achieving specific financial funding goals.

Description: Description of a group annuity contract with a separate investment account designed to provide the flexibility in the type of investment used for advance funding sought by many pension buyers without the complete loss of insurance company guarantees to an individual once he has retired. Followed by 2 discussion papers submitted.

Description: This is a discussion of the title paper by Robert M. Duncan which outlines the use of a contributory money purchase plan with death benefits, and investments in equities, to fund pensions. The approach is critiqued.

Description: This is a discussion of the paper, 'Life Agents' Retirement Plans under New York State Expense Limitations' by Peter M. Tompa. This discussion amplifies the paper with regards to comparison of funding retirement with single premium deferred annuities as opposed to the money purchase method and critiques the table used for valuation of benefits.

Description: The purpose of this note is to investigate whether, for a given level annual contribution rate, the introduction of a lump-sum benefit in lieu of a part of the pension otherwise payable, can result in a reduction of the mathematical risk due to chance deviations from expectation. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1953, Vol. 5, No. 12.

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This paper proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.

Description: These notes are a follow-up to the paper 'Introduction to the Dynamics of Pension Funding' by the same authors and published in Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1976, Vol. 28. The purpose of that paper was to provide an introduction to mathematical principles applicable to pension funding under dynamic conditions of population growth, inflation, and automatic adjustment of benefits. The first note discusses a general contribution formula and a number of special cases and modifications. The second note concerns aggregate cost funding when the actuary uses assumptions about cost factors which differ consistently from cost experience. The final note concerns the variation of the annuity unit under a variable annuity program patterned after the plan employed by the College Retirement Equities Fund [CREF]. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1981, Vol. 1.

Description: In March this year a charter for the new corporation, the College Retirement Equities Fund, was granted by the State of New York and it is expected that within a few months the Fund will begin operations as a supplement to TIAA annuities. The purpose of this paper is to describe this rather novel type of corporation, which presents some unusual and interesting actuarial problems. Comparisons of the performance of fixed annuities vs. variable annuities are provided.