Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This article discusses how to get data into and out of R, an open source language for statistical computing.

Description: A disscussion of actuar R, an R package for actuarial science, and its facilities in the fields of loss distribution modeling, risk theory and credibility theory.

Description: This article discusses Jed Frees’ book in progress, “Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications” which offers a synthesized introduction to regression and time series.

Description: Announcement that learning objectives for Exam MLC, MODELS FOR LIFE CONTINGENCIES, are being revised and will be in place for the spring 2012 administration of this examination.

Description: Overview of the session “Analytics You Should Know, but Don’t” which took place at the 2007 SOA Annual Meeting in which R, an open source language for statistical computing, was discussed.

Description: This article looks at an extensive integrated collection of financial mathematical modeling packages available in R, a language and environment for statistical computing.