Description: Panel session exploring a variety of issues connected to long-term disability reserve buyouts, including: · Advantages and risks for buyers and sellers · Use of appropriate reserving assumptions · Possible financial structures for a buyout

Description: This article delves into a new line of statistical thinking of the author, that may be useful for product development actuaries. The key concept is how product design can produce products that diversify quickly, meaning that the company can be confident of a profitable product line, based on fewer sales than might be true for other designs.

Description: This paper presents a generalization of the principal current methods of financial decision making. In the way physical sciences benefit from new general theories that encompass those theories they succeed, the science of finance can benefit from the development of a general framework that encompasses many of the current methods of financial analysis. The paper develops a general framework for financial decision-making from a few simple axioms of rational economic behavior.

Description: Review of Professor Belth's book 'Life Insurance: A Consumer Handbook'.

Description: This article is a companion to “They Go Bump in the Night: Life Insurance Policies and the Law of Material Change,” an article written by John T. Adney and Craig R. Springfield (May 2012 Taxing Times Supplement) that describes the various material change rules found in the Code, highlighting the complexities insurers face in navigating through these rules when a life insurance contract is materially changed. The Adney and Springfield article also addresses the difficulties in interpreting the tax law requirements under the various effective date rules contained in the Code sections affecting life insurance contracts.

Description: Summary of the ReFocus 2018 Conference, jointly sponsored by the American Council of Life Insurers and the SOA.

Description: We apply decision theory to develop a credibility formula that minimizes a loss function that is a linear combination of a squared-error term and a second-derivative term. The squared-error term measures the accuracy of the estimator, while the second-derivative term constrains the estimator to be close to linear.

Description: This article describes behavioral finance and its relevance in identifying analytics and processes suitable for a control environment for the actuarial aspects of an insurance company.

Description: Although rate structures where low-cost cohorts subsidize high cost cohorts may be justified from a actuarial, marketing, or legal standpoint, the subsidization creates risks which must be understood and monitored. This article presents the concept of subsidization signature to measure and interpret the effects of rate subsidization, and to assess the sustainability of rating structures and the sensitivity of business mix assumptions.