Description: This article poses the question, why doesn't the teaching of life contingencies start with the premise that the rate of investment income is a random process in a similar manner to the random nature of the time until death? The article suggests some methods for doing so.

Description: This article is the first in a series of articles on insurance applicant mortality risk analytics. From Small Talk Newsletter, Issue 37, January 2012.

Description: This article is the final installment of our three-part series on economic scenario generators (“ESGs”). Part I and II were published in the November 2019 and August 2020 issues of The Modeling Platform. Part III contextualizes the framework for selecting, building, and validating ESGs and focuses on the Academy Interest Rate Generator (“AIRG”), the most commonly used real-world ESG for US actuaries

Description: The analytical laws of mortality such as Gompertz and Makeham are often used by actuaries to describe the survival distributions. Numerical approaches to evaluate features such as mean and variance of these distributions may be very difficult not to mention the characteristics of their life contingent functions.