Description: This research report on the effect of deflation or high inflation has six sections: 1. The first section provides background on inflation, describes some problems in measuring inflation, and explains some of its effects on an economy. 2. The second section reviews historical inflation rates. 3. The third section examines the effect of inflation or deflation on the property-liability and life insurance industries. 4. The fourth section proposes risk mitigation strategies for insurers to cope with either deflation or high inflation rates. 5. The fifth section describes a publicly available model that can be used to develop inflation/deflation projections under a regime switching format that can readily be adjusted to reflect current financial uncertainty. 6. The sixth section provides conclusions.

Description: Initiated by the Financial Reporting Section, this paper explores rising interest rates. Following this path, the paper will look at implications of interest rate changes for the life insurance industry, current stress testing practices, and how a risk manager can proactively prepare for an uncertain future. A paper published in 2014 focused on why rates could stay low, and some aspects of this paper are similar (e.g., description of insurance products). This paper also uses a sample model office to help practitioners look at their own exposures. It includes typical interest-sensitive insurance products and how they might perform across various scenarios, as well as a survey to establish current practices for how insurers are testing interest rate risk currently.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute’s Mortality and Longevity Strategic Research Program Steering Committee issued a call for essays to explore the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to mortality and longevity. The objective was to gather a variety of perspectives and experiences on the use of AI in mortality modeling, forecasting and prediction to promote discussion and future research around this topic. The collection includes six essays that were accepted for publication from all submissions. Two essays were chosen for prizes based on their creativity, originality, and likelihood of further thought on the subject matter.

Description: The authors examine 19 factors to determine which were most closely linked to permanent and term life insurance premiums sold in the United States in 2020. With spatial regression analysis using multi-scale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) approach, the authors find the following 5 covariates to be the most statistically significant for and positively correlated with permanent insurance sold: household income, percentage of the population that is African American, education, health insurance, and Gini index (a statistical measure of wealth inequality)

Description: The SOA Research Institute engaged Milliman to perform a study examining life insurer practices on accelerated underwriting and how COVID-19 has impacted them. This effort included a separate outreach to actuaries working for twelve different state insurance departments. At the time of this report, three responses to our regulatory survey had been received. Therefore, the results of the three-question survey are discussed in broad terms, rather than using numerical measurements.

Description: This study and report have the following primary purposes: 1. Evaluate recent mortality experience relative to standard industry mortality tables, at a broad level. 2. Observe general trends in mortality experience by key policy characteristics. Where possible, provide insights into the industry changes contributing to the observed trends. 3. Provide the underlying data in spreadsheet pivot table format for further investigation by qualified actuaries. Provide data also in a delimited text file and Tableau dashboards for use with other software tools.

Description: Experience report for life insurance policies with face amounts of $1 million or higher.

Description: This document describes an effort to measure the deaths in the US population relative to pre-pandemic expectations. The actual deaths used are as reported by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and we consider several different methods for setting the expectations, adjusting for the estimated mix by age, sex, and time of the year (seasonality).

Description: April 13, 2021 Presentation at 2021 Life Insurance Conference

Description: The COVID-19 (COVID) pandemic has increased the demand for data and analysis on the impact of COVID on U.S. population mortality. This report is based on 2020 provisional death data released by the CDC. The SOA plans to update this report after additional 2020 cause of death data in released by the CDC later in 2021.