Description: This 2000 word essay won the Joint Management Risk Section 2016 Essay Prize, summarizing the present challenges, potential solutions and Actuarial opportunities.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: International case study discussing an innovative distribution method in India.

Description: Socio-economic mortality differentials are important to insurers, reinsurers as well as the general public. Detecting them, tracking them and explaining them is the subject of ongoing research and debate within the actuarial community as well as the wider public. The intention is to raise awareness within the reinsurance section membership for mortality differentials and concentration risk, as well as highlighting the value of interdisciplinary work and modern statistical methods. This intention overlaps with the goal of the SOA's Living to 100 Symposium, to be held in January 2017 in Orlando, Fla.

Description: The Behavioral Finance subgroup of the Health Section will be publishing a series of literature reviews in Health Watch. This is the first review of three in the series. The reviewed article describes an attempt to place an econometric value on consumers’ preferences between broad and narrow networks.

Description: This paper demonstrates that extreme value theory (EVT) can be used as a tool to model policyholder behavior in the extreme tail. This paper applies EVT to the study of variable annuity dynamic lapse behavior in the extreme tail. It illustrates a process whereby a company can fully model policyholder behavior, including the extreme tail, with existing data. No judgment about the extremal behavior is necessary.

Description: Public DB plans have fatal designs such as basing benefits on a few years of earnings. Redesigning DB to be similar to SS will alleviate solvency challenges.

Description: Three papers use sophisticated actuarial methods to develop a straightforward retirement income strategy that can be implemented in virtually any IRA or 401(k).

Description: discussion of the capital management alternatives for funding the additional reserves required due to Actuarial Guideline XXX

Description: It is, without doubt, the poorest people in the world who are most in need of the security that insurance brings. Renata De Leers and Queenie Chow discuss why the micro-insurance market has low penetration, and why actuaries are so well placed to assist insurers in understanding their clients' needs.