Description: This literature guide focuses on the distribution costs, especially the field compensation costs, that are incurred through the traditional general agency, branch office or brokerage structures for individual life, annuity and disability products.

Description: This paper develops a model of annuity mortality that facilitates a more thorough evaluation of the issues of policyholder antiselection and insurance company response. Aging occurs as an annuitant's health state changes. Death occurs either as terminal health state or by accident. By knowing the current health state, the annuitant or insurance company can improve its knowledge about life expectancy.

Description: Presented at October 1996 Annual Meeting. This discussion examines a few prototype annuity designs and mainly focuses on a typical single premium deferred annuity 'SPDA', a flexible premium deferred annuity, and a variable annuity.

Description: This is a discussion about new product developments, supplementary benefits - Accidental Death, Guaranteed Insurability and automatic inclusion of supplementary benefits rather than optional, product expense trends, considerations in setting commissions for policies with different characteristics, and analyzing and entering new markets.

Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to study mortality-based securities, such as mortality bonds and swaps, and to price the proposed mortality securities. The focus is on individual annuity data, although some of the modeling techniques could be applied to other lines of annuity or life insurance.

Description: This paper suggests a possible framework for the mandatory annuitization of U.S. retirement savings, considers the experience of other countries and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of mandatory annuitization.

Description: This paper explains how legal reforms related to annuities have decreased the popularity of annuities among plan sponsors, and then describes how a proposal for a federal charter option for life insurance companies could hold some promise for persuading plan sponsors to put annuities back into savings plans.

Description: This general discussion looks at problems or solutions developed in the field of agents' compensation, considerations leading companies to recent reductions in individual annuity rates, trend to offer first year cash values, increasing demand for the issuance of insurance at ages up to 70 and beyond, and if the SOA should give consideration to elective subjects in the Fellowship exam.

Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.