Description: A focus on the capital markets perspective and some of the products dealers offer to hedge and help mitigate capital costs and tail exposure risks. From The Actuary Magazine, April/May 2005

Description: A solicitation for letters to the editor of Expanding Horizons.

Description: This article discusses Jed Frees’ book in progress, “Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications” which offers a synthesized introduction to regression and time series.

Description: This article provides an update, as of October 2023, on Financial Reporting Section research projects in process and those recently completed.

Description: Article describes best practices for teaching a course module that involves multiple parameters. A good example is hypothesis testing which requires consideration of the parameters, sample-size, population distribution, known variance and has as consequences whether a normal or t distribution should be used or whether non parametric methods are used. The articles recommends use of the Prime Implicant Normal Form as a means of teaching. It shows the superiority of this method over other forms such as heuristics, complete rules, or graduated approaches.

Description: The article provides an overview of the federal tax treatment of long-term care insurance contracts, including a brief history of the tax treatment of long-term care insurance, the requirements that must be satisfied in order to be treated as qualified long-term care insurance under the Internal Revenue Code, and a brief discussion of qualified long-term care combination products and chronic and terminal illness accelerated death benefits offered under life insurance contracts.

Description: This article demonstrates that the alternative method of adjusting DAC amortization for actual experience fails to serve its purpose if amortization is based on amounts in force at the end of a reporting period. In that situation, the method would increase the amortization rate for excess terminations. Applying that increased rate to a lower basis, however, does not reliably reduce the unamortized DAC balance as required.

Description: Sustainable operations under changes in accounting principles and solvency standards

Description: The article discusses the recent final and proposed regulations published by the IRS and Treasury on the required minimum distribution rules for qualified plans, which implement changes made by SECURE 1.0 and SECURE 2.0. The article is intended to identify the important rules in the final regulations, provide a framework for determining how the rules apply to beneficiaries of qualified plans and IRAs, describe the key differences between the earlier 2022 proposed regulations and the final regulations, and it summarizes the SECURE 2.0 provisions contained in the new proposed regulations.

Description: Discusses the growing and evolving field of pricing and valuing stock option plans, and makes the case that actuaries are the professionals best qualified to serve clients in the field.