Description: This article analyzes and confirms the circumstances where a change in the mortality assumption does and does not have a significant impact on pension valuations.

Description: This article summarizes the focus of the inaugural The Pension Conference which is the difficult investment environment for pension plans and the increased choice and competition that accompany that environment.

Description: An excerpt from the 2003 Annual report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Trust Funds which describes the basic methodology and assumptions used for the intermediate assumptions.

Description: This article describes techniques and models used to forecast mortality improvement and the considerations that underlie long-term mortality improvement projections in the United States.

Description: A checklist for treaty preparations and review of a standard life Reinsurance Agreement. This document covers the purpose of each provision, the common elements, common variations and problems that may arise.

Description: Contains two separate articles, called notes. The first note, “A note on correlation in mean variance portfolio theory,” is an elementary discussion of how negative correlation coefficients can be, given any set of N random variables. The second note, “Two essential formulas in actuarial science and financial mathematics,” gives a more or less self-contained introduction to Jensen’s inequality and to another formula, which the author decided to call the “survival function expectation formula.”

Description: Survey of appointed actuaries about asset adequacy testing techniques currently being used in 2012.

Description: This session will serve as a guide on how to implement a factor-based optimization in the Strategic Asset Allocation process. The session will review a factor-based investing approach and cover the top-down macroeconomic drivers of risk and return for various asset classes. We will then illustrate implementation of this investing approach and determination of an optimal Strategic Asset Allocation through a pension fund case study. There will be an interactive element to the session as the factor sensitivities of various portfolios can be examined in real-time.

Description: This Specialty Guide is designed to be a source of information for practitioners interested in: learning more about the subject of Economic Capital - definition, uses, tie-in to RBC and calculations - finding out about current market practices in this area, and getting acquainted with available literature on this topic.

Description: The Delphi method was applied to several questions regarding trends in product development. The audience participated in the Delphi survey to predict how economic and demographic factors will impact pricing over the next 7 years.