Description: Small pension plans, are using Cost of Living Allowances 'COLA' in calculating benefits. This paper examines ways to handle COLA in valuations.

Description: The subject of this paper is a financial model for pension planning purposes. The focus of the model is from an individual's point of view with the idea to assist him/her in planning for a financially secure retirement income. The model is dynamic and stochastic, operates in nominal and real terms, and goes beyond the age of retirement. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1981, Vol. 1.

Description: This paper is part of The research project dealing with pension accounting, more precisely with Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 87 [or FAS 87]. The goal of the project is to study the variability of pension accounting costs under FAS 87. In this paper, the author addresses only one specific point, namely the behavior of experience gains and losses over time. This is directly related to the corridor approach to amortization of gains and losses. However, what is said also applies to experience gains and losses in other areas, particularly in pension funding and insurance. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, Vol. 1.

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 today's atmosphere, the high returns available on bonds have attracted much investor interest, and it is only natural that fixed income investors look for ways to assure the maintenance of high returns on their bond portfolios. This paper explains how bond immunization offers that potential.

Description: The authors have been involved with the development of an economically unbiased model for the distribution of pension benefits in divorce. While the research is not completed, it was felt that some of their findings and insights might be of interest to the actuarial community. In view of this, the purpose of this article is to: 1. Present the findings of the authors with respect to their review of major court cases, and 2. Identify major actuarial issues which are as yet unresolved. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1990, Vol. 1.

Description: In this paper the author shows that the aggregate claims distribution of a portfolio modeled by a mix of the individual and collective models can be obtained with a single recursion under some conditions. He discusses why the collective model is not necessarily an approximation of the individual model in the context of pension funds, for example. An application to a Swiss pension fund is presented. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2003, Vol. 1.

Description: Pension funds are usually either defined benefit or defined contribution funds. In Australia in recent years, for a number of reasons, some pension funds have offered the 'greater of,' these two benefits. Such a benefit design can be valued using contingent claims valuation techniques since it is equivalent to an option on the maximum of two random benefit amounts - one equal to a multiple of salary and the other the accumulation of a percentage of salary at an earnings rate. This paper overviews some of the issues in applying contingent claims valuation techniques to the valuation of this style of benefit. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, Vol. 1.

Description: This paper solves the pension benefit allocation problem using an extremely simple accounting approach. It presents a simple accounting argument, which says that the cost for like units of production should increase at the rate of inflation. If we assume that the appropriate units of production for an employee are inflation-adjusted salary, this rationale leads to projected unit credit with the benefit apportioned by interest-adjusted salary [PUCIAS] as the appropriate funding method for pensions. This same rationale can be extended to post-service medical care funding. For post-service medical care, however, the rationale does not lead to PUCIAS, since the rates of inflation for medical care and salary do not cancel. There is also a question whether inflation-adjusted salary should be used as the units of production for post-service medical care. When it is, it is still important avoid aggregating groups with different salary and promotion patterns. When it is not, the widget accounting arguments still hold as far unit costs increasing with the rate of medical care inflation.

Description: This paper is about the looming pension crisis in Canada. Falling pension coverage, poor quality of coverage, and the shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans suggest that there will still be a strong dependency on Government, but government programs are also in a weak position largely due to the well documented phenomenon of an aging population. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, Vol. 3.