Description: The editorial illustrates public finance issues, focusing on the themes of Social Security and Medicare Advantage plans that are highlighted in this issue.

Description: Overview of a recently published paper that explains how credibility theory can be applied to develop mortality assumptions for defined benefit plans.

Description: A reflection on the need/desire for one right answer when there isn't one

Description: Performance measurement is not the primary purpose of either GAAP or statutory accounting. This article discusses alternative methods of reporting used by life insurance companies to better measure financial performance.

Description: This paper discusses the need for actuarial judgment to be used in conjunction with statistical analysis in the calculation of incurred but not reported IBNR claim reserves.

Description: In an effort to build a bridge between epidemiological and actuarial modeling, this paper analyzes possible financial arrangements made against expenses resulted from medical treatments given to insured patients. Based on classical compartment models, the first part of this paper designs insurance policies for susceptible participants facing the risk of infection and formulates the financial obligations of both parties using actuarial methodology. For practical purposes, the second part employs a variety of numerical methods for calculating premiums and reserves. The last part illustrates the methods by designing insurance products for the Great Plague in Eyam and the SARS Epidemic in Hong Kong.

Description: Spreadsheets have become ubiquitous in business and forecasting. However, they do not usually have the same level of control that any other complex program would require. As a result, we often get erroneous results which can have far reaching, negative consequences.

Description: This article describes a method that can be useful when re-fitting a risk score model to a population of only moderate size. Learn how to use concepts like ridge regression to train a model with partial credibility.