Description: A supplemental report conducted in 2009 to contrast results of the 2008 study, 'Will Retirement Assets Last a Lifetime'? It discusses retirees confidence in having sufficient assets to fully fund their retirement, their willingness to take risk, efforts to control spending and their use of financial advisers.

Description: This article is a summary of the roundtable discussion with a group of panelists on how to appropriately measure public pension plan liabilities. The crux of the debate is whether public pension plans should disclose a market value of liability - MVL - or whether current disclosures are adequate.

Description: Letter from the Chair of the Product Development Council. Challenging times bring opportunities. Today's low interest environment is a rallying cry for our industry to transform our products and the way we do business

Description: Pricing longevity swap reinsurance transactions consists of a number of different actuarial tasks, each of which hides potential pitfalls. The article outlines the pricing process, which includes a detailed analysis of current mortality experience of the portfolio to be transferred, choice and calibration of an appropriate model for mortality improvement trends and the calculation of a risk margin which reflects the uncertainty associated with the pricing best-estimate, which includes mis-estimation risk, model risk, longevity basis risk and stochastic uncertainty.

Description: The authors explore a new approach to the premium persistency assumption in universal life products.

Description: There is often a disconnect between the way products are priced IRR and embedded value methods and the way business performance is measured once it is already on the books GAAP and GAAP ROE. This article discusses the theoretical reasons for this disconnect and how an accounting system could be developed to eliminate the disconnect and thereby align investor and management expectations with the financial reporting system.

Description: Treasurer’s Report of the Financial Reporting Section of the Society of Actuaries—2001

Description: This actually is a copy of an appendix of a research paper sponsored by the SOA Committee on Finance Research. You can read the entire research paper: “Lapse Modeling for the Post-Level Period—a Practical Application of Predictive Modeling” at the SOA site https://www.soa.org/Research/Research-Projects/Finance-Investment/lapse-2015-modeling-post-level/#sthash.W9lERSls.dpbs, but you can read this valuable appendix copied here in this issue to see how to build a PM step-by-step using your data and the R programming language. We thank Richard Xu, Dihui Lai, Minyu Cao, Scott Rushing, and Tim Rozar for their excellent paper and the Society of Actuaries, for the permission to reprint this portion of the paper.