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.

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 first discusses the history of the legislation of the joint and survivor benefits for the uniformed service personnel. It then goes on to address the specific actuarial assumptions made and the formulas developed for applying these assumptions for adaptability to the UNIVAC. This paper closes with specific programming procedures involved in using the UNIVAC.

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: Traditional pension cost methods are based on the actuarial present value of future benefits [which is a mean value]. As a consequence, these cost methods are deficient because they cannot provide plan sponsors with certain valuable information such as the probability that the accumulation of a particular sequence of contributions will ultimately provide sufficient funds to pay benefits, or the size of fund needed to ensure that retirees' lifetime benefits are paid with a specified probability. In response to these deficiencies, a new family of cost methods, called a-percentile cost methods, is developed. These cost methods are based on the probability of adequately covering all participants' benefits. Expressions for the normal cost, the accrued liability and the gain are provided. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1993, Vol. 45.

Description: The primary purpose of this paper is to set forth one method of evaluating vested pension costs and to suggest a simple way for the actuary to make provision in his pension cost calculations for specific vesting schedules. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1966, Vol. 18, Pt. 1, No. 52.

Description: Traditional pension mathematics assumes that mortality rates are fixed at a valuation date. If mortality rates reduce after a valuation date, the liabilities of a defined benefit plans 'DB plans' increase, leading to deficits. Such deficits are somewhat unpredictable, because the evolution of mortality rates is a random process. This problem, which is often called longevity risk, makes the maintenance of DB plans difficult. The International Accounting Standards Board 'IASB' has plans to tackle the arduous problem of how to disclose longevity risk on financial statements. The IASB was established in 2001 to create universal accounting standards, called International Accounting Reporting Standards 'IFRSs'. A primary objective of this paper is to propose a number of methods that can help actuaries and plan sponsors quantify and disclose longevity risk.

Description: The administrators of Social Security offset-type defined benefit plans commonly encounter two difficulties when attempting to calculate the Primary Insurance Amount 'PIA' offset. The first difficulty is in obtaining the Social Security earnings history. The second difficulty is in performing the calculation itself. This paper explores the possibility of substituting a variant of the employee's final average salary for his or her Social Security Average Indexed Monthly Earnings 'AIME'. The acceptability of this substitution is then critiqued with illustrations. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 32.

Description: This paper presents a stochastic model in continuous time to characterize the ultimate benefit to be derived by a group of similar workers from their career membership in pension plans. This characterization is in terms of termination rates, vesting rules, plan types and periods of employment. The employment termination pattern is represented by a renewal process and a reward function is introduced to unify different plan types. A number of basic functions are then deduced to represent termination benefits, retirement benefits and the loss due to delayed vesting. An analysis of these functions lead to a number of conclusions regarding the comparative effects of delayed vesting in different plans. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1981, Vol. 1.

Description: In this article, the authors introduce a new policy-making model for pension plan funding which openly represents the uncertainty. The word 'policy' is used here to indicate a strategy which is intended to be followed most [but not necessarily all] of the time. In unusual circumstances, the policy will have to be modified at the end of the year to retain qualification. However, the frequency with which this remedial action is needed is controllable by the actuary [unlike the method of using expected values]. The simple substitution of expected values of random quantities produces an unknown frequency of last minute remedial actions at possibly disastrous investment costs to the pension plan. However, with this paper's techniques, once the actuary acknowledges the uncertainty associated with the various aspects of the pension plan, he/she can explicitly trade off the costs associated with remedial actions, tax penalties, etc. with the investment returns in order to meet the pension plan goals. The method that this paper introduces is a new Chance-Constrained Programming approach to selecting annual contribution levels and asset allocation [holding other factors fixed] that the authors believe will better fit the employer's goals while recognizing the many risks and constraints associated with defined benefit plans. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, Vol. 3.