Description: A review/highlights of the report on US population mortality improvements for the 4 years up to 2001

Description: The National Center For Health Statistics recently came out with preliminary 2006 U.S. population mortality statistics—showing lower mortality and a record life expectancy!

Description: An examination of the increase in mortality rate for Alzheimer's during the period 2000-2010

Description: Future mortality improvement has been a common assumption in life insurance and annuity pricing and forecasting for many years. However, experience over the last decade suggests this might be an assumption that merits reconsideration in the United States. This article will take a closer look at factors that impact mortality improvement trends and discuss why insurers may want to reevaluate product designs to better manage the associated mortality risk. We then introduce a product idea with this in mind, where premiums are based on a life expectancy index and insurers share the risk (and opportunity) or mortality improvement with policyholders.

Description: Originally featured as a breakout session at the 2015 CRC, this presentation discusses, from a North-American and non-actuarial perspective, how population growth and size have a major impact on socio-demographic needs in term of health care, social and old age security, education, transport and infrastructure. Their underlying components are two opposing forces, namely mortality and longevity. Understanding their past and possible future key drivers is not only important to the macro-economic planning of government agencies, but also to pension funds, insurance companies, and other stakeholders of the financial and insurance industries.

Description: This article details different methods for calculating mortality impact associated with new underwriting programs. A common simplified calculation is compared and contrasted with two first principles approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches are discussed.

Description: Discussion of the Society of Actuaries Report on Mortality Improvement Survey from March 2003 survey from the summer of 2000

Description: The article gives specific information as to why insurance companies would want to participate in intercompany mortality studies. Product Development News, August 2000, Issue No. 50.

Description: This article discusses the concept of Conservation of Mortality ("Conservation"). Conservation is the modeling principle that ensures consistency between assumptions of the total mortality of a population and mortality among population subsets. This article discusses the use cases for Conservation and the many ways that one could implement it in a model or an experience study. This article also discusses the potential issues that arise when using Conservation, and how one might solve or alleviate these issues.

Description: In the June 2014 issue of Product Matters, Doug Robbins of Pacific Life authored a fascinating article entitled “Velocity of Diversification.” Therein, he proposed a pricing measure that describes the “…speed at which confidence in profitability is attained”. How can stochastic modeling of mortality be applied to analyze the velocity of diversification, and how would that measure be affected by volatility in the underlying assumptions?