Description: According to the Actuarial Standards Board’s Actuarial Standard of Practice No. 49 (ASOP 49), actuarially sound Medicaid managed care capitation rates will include a provision for underwriting gain in order to provide compensation for the risks assumed by an MCO. However, there is no generally accepted method for quantifying underwriting gain in managed Medicaid capitation rates. This article discusses a new model developed to address this void and calculate underwriting gain. The model was developed by researching existing financial literature and performing a statistical analysis of industry data to build out a framework that can be leveraged to estimate underwriting gain.

Description: Authored by a MIB Solutions team of Tom Rhodes, Stuart Klugman, Marianne Purushotham and Stacy Gill, the report summarizes the results of a study on the application and adoption of credibility theory within the life insurance and annuity industry. This excel spreadsheet is a numerical example relating to the application of Credibility for lapses. Please see the SOA website research section for the complete research report on Credibility Theory Practices.

Description: The SOA's Committee on Finance Research is please to make available the results of this research project, jointly sponsored by the SOA and CAS, that explores economic series and provides and Excel based tool for generating future economic scenarios. This is an Excel Spreadsheet for Appendix C showing Simulated Financial Scenario Data of inflation rates and interest rates from this research project. Please see the SOA website for the full report and other related spreadsheets.

Description: Overview of the session “Analytics You Should Know, but Don’t” which took place at the 2007 SOA Annual Meeting in which R, an open source language for statistical computing, was discussed.

Description: This report covers the latest emerging trends in U.S. population mortality. The SOA relied upon data furnished by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Observations are based on the CDC’s recent release of 2021 mortality experience, along with prior mortality experience data from 1999 through 2020.

Description: LIMRA, Reinsurance Group of America (RGA), the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute, and TAI have collaborated on an ongoing effort to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the individual life insurance industry’s mortality experience and share the emerging results with the insurance industry and the public. This report documents a high-level analysis of the claims that have been reported.

Description: The Mortality Improvement Life Working Group released a recommendation for a set of improvement factors that vary by gender and attained age to be used in conjunction with the 2008 Valuation Basic table or the 2015 Valuation Basic table for AG-38 purposes.

Description: Dive into this review on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) techniques for actuarial modeling for life & annuities. Presenters will showcase learnings from the recent SOA research paper "Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning – Practical Applications for Actuarial Modeling" (Nested Stochastic). The researchers will go over models and methodologies used to develop high-fidelity proxy models for various life & annuity applications.

Description: The Individual Life Experience Committee is holding a competition encouraging actuaries and other interested parties to predict 2017 industry mortality based on a data set containg 2009 - 2016 data. The competition is not only about predicting mortality, but also about explaining and presenting the results.

Description: In *From Distress to Distinction*, Chris Droussiotis explores a novel approach to valuing distressed companies using option pricing theory, drawing parallels to the financial challenges faced by startups. With over 30 years in banking and startup advising, he emphasizes that both distressed firms and early-stage ventures endure periods of negative cash flow but retain potential for recovery. He combines Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model to evaluate distressed firms’ recovery prospects and debt sustainability. A case study on Spirit Airlines illustrates this approach: though its current equity value is negative, projected future cash flows suggest significant potential recovery. Droussiotis concludes that strategic valuation, using trend, peer, and expected analysis, can reveal hidden value in distressed companies, guiding effective investment and restructuring decisions.