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: This is the abstract of a paper that builds on previous work concerned with measuring equity, and considers the problem of using observed claim data or other information to arrive at premiums which maximize equity. When these optimal premiums are used, it is shown that gathering more information or refining the risk classification must always increase equity.

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: 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: Group life insurance often represents an important component of the typical employee benefit package. The purpose of the present paper is to explore some aspects of different benefit schedules. In this paper, a method is suggested for analysing group life insurance benefit schedules with respect to certain criteria. The procedure is illustrated by means of simple numerical examples.

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 is a simplified approach to calculating the variance of the whole life random variable in certain, very common circumstances.