Description: An analysis of the revamped state sponsored retirement income pension gives insight into design and funding elements that might figure in reforming social security in the United States.

Description: Description of the design and purpose of the military health system and Veterans Health Administration's programs. Covers the types of benefits offered and how these programs differ from typical commercial health systems.

Description: An interview of the winning co authors of the SOA essay contest on how differences in wealth and retirement outcomes are experienced by people of different races and ethnicities and to promote a better understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the differences.

Description: This article describes the recent development of pilot wellness programs for Long-Term Care insurance and suggests why they are beneficial to both policyholders and insurance companies.

Description: A note to the section members from the outgoing and incoming section chairs.

Description: Climate risk modeling is taking center stage. With businesses increasingly expected to show how they assess, adapt to, and mitigate the risks of climate change, companies are asking: What is the right climate risk modeling approach for our business?

Description: 2022 Welcome and Strategic Themes for the Marketing and Distribution Section Council.

Description: In this article, we summarize inflationary factors that may result in a sharp increase in interest rates and implications for life insurer convexity risk exposure, most notably to dynamic policyholder lapsation. We further provide insights into potential ALM strategies to mitigate this convexity risk. Due to the prolonged low-interest rate environment and low minimum interest rate guarantees offered to policyholders, liability convexity is higher than prior historical periods, which results in life insurers’ ALM positions being extremely vulnerable to short-term interest rate spikes. Convexity mismatches cause issues for life insurers under both rising and declining interest rate scenarios. This means that life insurers are not compensated for taking convexity risk and, therefore, convexity matching should always be considered in the asset optimization process. There are mixed signals from policymakers and financial markets regarding potential inflationary and sharply rising interest rate scenarios. The key takeaway is that life insurers are not compensated for taking convexity risk and it is the right time for insurers to review convexity exposure. There are different approaches available to mitigate convexity exposure through rebalancing of asset positions and hedges within each life insurer’s risk limits.

Description: In the spring of 2019, Dr. Cai started to serve as the Actuarial Science Program coordinator at Salisbury University, a medium-sized public teaching school in Maryland. At that time, the program was small, with only two faculty members who focused on both statistics and actuarial science, with approximately 10 students. During the next five years, the program did make some achievements in curriculum development, student exam preparation, job placement, and recognition, but Dr. Cai continued to have a dream to make the program unique. Dr. Cai believed that the skill sets students learned, even from a small program, could enable them to compete with anyone on a global basis. In spring 2024, Dr. Cai advised a group of exceptional actuarial students to participate in the 2024 Society of Actuaries (SOA) Student Research Case Study Challenge (SRCSC), and the team won third place – —behind two teams from the University of New South Wales, Australia. This article is the story of the journey.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.