Description: New products should address having acceptable carrier risks and at the same time enhance the product’s value to consumers to pave the way for broader acceptance.

Description: This paper discusses the equitable disritibution from defined contribution plans upon marital dissolution. From The Pension Forum, January 2003, Volume 15, Issue No. 1.

Description: A summary of the Pension Section Council activities including research projects, the establishment of guiding principles, and its financial statement.

Description: This article discusses how actuaries are uniquely qualified to help individuals meet the significant challenges that will have a dramatic impact on their security and happiness during retirement. Therefore, the time has come for the Personal Retirement Actuary.

Description: This column discusses the use and management of data withn the computer language R.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Society of Actuaries, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2004, Vol. 1.

Description: This paper studies a smoothing spline Poisson regression model for the analysis of mortality data. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2006, Vol. 1.

Description: In the context of reinsurance, this paper addresses finding the quota share retention level and the retention limit, with a diffusion process being added to the claim process, that maximizes the adjustment coefficient in the Sparre Anderson model. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2006.

Description: This is the abstract of a paper that presents an iterative procedure for computing the lower approximation of the Snell envelope - a value process of the American option. The method produces an increasing sequence of approximations of the Snell envelope from below, which coincide with the Snell envelope in discrete time after finite steps. Advantages of this method compared with other well-known traditional approaches are discussed first. Then, elaborate algorithm details associated with theoretical proofs are discussed. An example of constructing the lower approximation is available with numerical results, which are demonstrated in figures. Some characteristics of the implementation in the computational environment and an improvement are mentioned at the end.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that considers a general risk model in which both the claim and income gain arrivals follow Poisson processes.