Description: Mexico substituted its defined benefit system [IMSS] of the formal sector by a defined contribution system in 1997. The initial plan called for buying single premium annuities for the widows and disabled workers under the new system. In the first three years, this market came to occupy a significant part of the insurance sector. Then, the number of workers getting benefits started to fall dramatically. This is the abstract of a paper that shows that such a fall has been a direct result of how the IMSS authorizes the issuance of single premium annuities. The paper analyses the rationale behind such a dramatic change in policy, analyzes various possible scenarios of IMSS strategies, and examines the problem to see if it brings in any long-term benefits to IMSS.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that reverses the sequence of the Euler (or gradient) allocation technique by calculating the marginal costs of risk exposures for a profit maximizing financial institution with risk averse counterparties, and then identifying a closed-form solution for the risk measure whose gradient delivers the correct marginal costs.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that investigates how to best choose a model from a flexible set of regime-switching models where the individual regimes are not constrained to be from the same distributional family.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that shows that by modeling the time series of mortality rate changes rather than mortality rate levels, human mortality can be better modeled.

Description: Introduction of a symposium of papers that arose out of the discussions of the Committee on Retirement Systems Practice Education regarding the adequacy of defined benefit pension plan funding.

Description: The abstract for the paper Search for Predictors of Exceptional Human Longevity: Using Computerized and Internet Resources for Human Longevity Studies.

Description: The abstract for the paper An Investigation of Select Birth Cohorts.

Description: The abstract for the paper Trajectories of Disability and Mortality Among the U.S. Elderly Population: Evidence from the 1984-1999 NLTCS.

Description: The abstract for the paper Mortality at Advanced Aged in the United Kingdom.

Description: This is the abstract for a paper that seeks to construct a new system for pension funding that balances the needs of all the pension stakeholders. The paper presents a system that supports plan sponsors’ needs for predictable and relatively smooth contribution streams with the needs of the PBGC, pensioners, and taxpayers for a well-funded system. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.