Description: 1992 SOA Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. This session discussion was about the performance measurement in a risk/return context, incentive compensation as a tool for achieving effective performance, and return attribution using liability-based performance indices.

Description: Chairperson’s column describing activities the Product Development section has undertaken to date.

Description: The author offers his proof that an annuity for the life expectancy exceeds a life annuity.

Description: Panelists at this session of the SOA 2003 Washington, DC Spring Meeting discuss how changes in interest rates affect the assets and liabilities of a life insurance company and what a company can do to prepare. This session examines historical trends in interest rates and how companies have reacted to both sudden and gradual changes.

Description: In this session, a company will share its experience on managing risks underlying the equity-linked insurance guarantees and what lessons were learned over these years as it adapted its strategies to suit the current market environment.

Description: The speaker will share his insights into the hedging challenges faced by FIA and VA business in the current market environment.

Description: Retirees will face the societal issue of inadequate savings with likely insufficient time to rectify the situation. They need immediate growth, but also the disciplines of risk management. They typically do not know how to engage with these two aspects in a harmonious manner on their own. Insurance companies are in the business of providing the solution but regulators have been clamping down in favor of simpler and more transparent products. In addition, the market reality over the last decade has been that insurers have stock betas at a multiple to the general markets with PE ratios well below. A panel of senior professionals from writers of retirement product business will present their vision of how the insurance industry can address the above dilemma, including the risks underlying the writing of the business, impact of financial markets, and regulations in the development of the business.

Description: This 1977 panel discussion focused on effective product management of life insurance. Topics included: 1. Definition of effective product management 2. Internal organization required 3. Establishment of objectives for a product line 4. Coordination of company activities with respect to initial design 5. Monitoring

Description: An exploration of drivers, cohorts and dynamics for policyholder behavior for VA and FIA based on industry experience data, including changes in recent years and the emergence of long-term data in key areas. We will also discuss critical elements to developing a sustainable and coherent framework to translate this complex experience data into assumption models.

Description: We devise an approach, using tobit models for modeling annuity lapse rates. The approach is based on data provided by the Society of Actuaries’ Risk Management Task Force. Kim [2005a] models annuity lapse rates using a logit model and the same US data (he also used Korean data separately). We find that the tobit model is a more than suitable approach for all levels of the explanatory variables including interest rates, unemployment rates, and GDP growth rates. Specifically, policyholder behavior in the tail of the distribution of lapse rates is explained as well as it is in the normal range of lapse rates.