Description: The Defined Benefit 'DB' underpin Defined Contribution hybrid pension plan offers an attractive combination of benefit security and upside potential for pension plan members, and offers cost containment for employers, whilst still ensuring the provision of adequate equitable benefits. The DB underpin guarantee is valued and hedged as a financial option within the traditional funding paradigms of actuarial science. However, the average monthly hedging costs are time dependent and can be unstable when employees are close to retirement. This is the abstract of a paper that proposes some cost control approaches to reduce the volatility of the hedging cost.

Description: This paper fits a logistic model to the actual data of cumulative cases from the 2003 SARS outbreak. The model proves a good fit for the four areas examined: China [mainland], Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore. Explanatory variables are then incorporated to link the model parameters to economic and demographic indices of areas hit heavily by SARS. The work enables prediction of the future behavior of SARS or other epidemics should they ever strike again.

Description: This is an abstract article about racial disparities in healthcare by Paul Johnson.

Description: This is an abstract article about equity release mechanisms by Siu Hang Li, Mary Hardy and Ken Seng Tan. ARCH 2008, Issue 1.

Description: This paper shows the application of a threshold strategy on the surplus level of an insurance risk model results in a process that can be analyzed as a doubly infinite Markov chain with finite blocks. The resulting procedures are then used to calculate the probability distributions for time of ruin, the surplus immediately prior to ruin, and the deficit at ruin. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2008, Vol.1.

Description: Development of annuities markets is a critical element of any private system. In Mexico, when the new pension regimen came into existence in 1997, the Mexican Institute of Social Security [IMSS] was supposed to buy a single premium annuity for all the people who become eligible under the new regime. Disability pensions represent 37% of total pensions sold up to date. Mortality of disables show substantial differences against the mortality table use to compute the annuity. Most of the differences can be explained by looking at the disability causes. Using information for social security for 2001 and 2002, regarding mortality and disability, this is the abstract of a paper that presents the main causes of disability among disables and the main causes of mortality of those disables who died in their first and second year of disability. The analysis of those cases apart from explaining the important differences between the expected mortality and the observed mortality during the first two years of disability, also explains some of the latter changes in the operational rules of IMSS.

Description: This paper highlights the menace of overweight and obesity which are on the rise. Health care systems and insurance industries are directly affected. Liability claims are on waiting. The food related damage claims are costly. Insurers are therefore driven to find a solution: classify overweight and obesity as a group, adjust their premium to reflect the cost, and justify the classification and the adjustments.

Description: This is the abstract of a paper that addresses the question of how an employer can offer phased retirement in such a way that, indeed, employees work longer before fully retiring.

Description: This is an abstract for Monte Carlo calculations illustrating the characteristics of a regime-switching stochastic model with randomized regime parameters.

Description: This abstract is for a paper that develops a class of robust estimators for the credibility premium when claims are approximately gamma-distributed, and thoroughly studies their robustness-efficiency trade-offs in large and small samples.