Description: This paper addresses controversies related to Zillmer Reserves first proposed in the 1860's and discusses how actuaries can learn form these dilemmas and find a review of the controversy useful in more current practice. The paper was presented at the 25th Actuarial Research Conference held at the University of Western Ontario in 1990. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1991, VOL. 1.

Description: This paper discusses some powerful uses of recursive functions, including: 1. Universal life, both for the calculation of target premiums and reserves. 2. Paid-up Rider. Recursive functions can directly determine a premium that precisely matures the rider. 3. Traditional Whole Life. Reserves can be efficiently calculated when needed instead of referring to a table of stored factors. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, VOL. 3.

Description: Addresses Scheel's proposal for splitting life insurance between its savings and death benefit elements in order to reduce total variance of the risk. This paper refutes Scheel's proposition.

Description: This paper presents a new approach for pricing insurance contracts. The approach is based both on economic and probabilistic arguments. The novel property of this paper is that the pricing argument is based on two factors determining the insurer's expected profit: the first one is the net revenue from selling insurance contracts and the second is the possible loss due to insolvency. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1997 Vol. 1.

Description: The problem of estimation of a tabular survival model from complete samples is considered from a Bayesian approach. If a life test involves a large cohort group, then data is typically given as a grouped data set. The survival function St is usually estimated by the moment estimator. We approximate the joint prior distribution of the unknown unconditional failure probabilities by a Dirichlet distribution, and then use a linear relationship between St and the conditional survival probabilities to obtain a Bayes estimator of St.

Description: This article describes a couple of things can be done to speed up universal life calculations in a BASIC program. It describes how the calculation of year end fund value can be done in one pass instead of 12.

Description: This paper is written totally under present Indian conditions, but keeping an eye on the future, when there will be number of insurers, and this model can be applied to any condition where a number of insurers already exist. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to measure, from the point of view of a potential life insurance policyholder, the quality of the insurers and the variability between them so that it will be helpful for potential policyholders to choose their insurers according to their requirements.

Description: An updated and expanded translation of the 1863 Theory of Life Insurance Premium Reserves by Dr. August Zillmer, Stettin, Prussia. This is a seminal paper for the life insurance reserve method used extensively in Europe.

Description: The adjustment coefficient R plays an important role in mathematical ruin theory this paper presents several different methods for estimating the variance of R. Examples are given in which the variance is so high that the estimate of R must be considered essentially worthless and other means are sought for estimating ruin probabilities. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1990 Vol. 1.

Description: This paper develops a theory for the valuation of some kinds of interest sensitive cash flows. A process is derived which takes as input, assumptions about the capital markets and policy holder behaviour, and produces as output interest and decrement assumptions which can be used for conventional actuarial discounting. The methodology is illustrated using some idealized, but tractable, models of conventional non-par whole life insurance. The method is also applied to a simple Universal Life plan. The paper concludes by considering some of the problems encountered when applying the ideas to more practical problems.