Description: Concomitant with the industrial revolution, the function of providing old age income shifted from families and local institutions to government social security and private pension plans. The history of this change in the U.K. and U.S. is reviewed. A simple mathematical model provides insights into the role played by three rates [the rate of increase of the working population, the time preference rate, and the rate of real wage growth] in determining optimum funding policy. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994, Vol. 2.

Description: Actuarial literature in the twenty-five years includes discussions of a well known inequality. Among the recent papers on various aspects of this classic result are those by Berin 1970, Olson 1975 and Sarason 1960. A standard method for achieving this inequality uses Jensen's inequality. This is the method used by Bowers, et al 1983. We will also employ this method in an attempt to learn about it.

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 this paper we shall present our results in terms of the estimation of human mortality rates, but the results carry over to other applications. We shall discuss a Bayesian model that encompasses both graduation [smoothing] and prediction.

Description: Abstracts of various papers published in ARCH 1983 Vol. 1

Description: Study of the Pareto distribution and its affect on life contingencies. Includes examples of the mortality model, actuarial present values, and whole life premiums.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to perform conjugate Bayesian analysis on the negative binomial distribution with the goal of providing a standard by which approximate credibility formulas and approximate predictive distriubtion may be judged. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1993, VOL. 1.

Description: This provides a basic example of a mathematical model which may be used to build an investment portfolio which will minimize the risk of interest rate fluctuations.

Description: This article is a brief summary of the 1983 Actuarial Research Conference held September 29 - October 1, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The topic was Population Projections: Techniques and Implications. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1984, Vol. 1.