Description: This articles explores the notion of whether the old rules and paradigms of investment strategy and caution may no longer be applicable in today’s financial environment, because things were “different this time.”

Description: “What is the likelihood of market crashes? This article seeks to provide an answer to this and related questions by focusing mainly on the crash of October 1987. Specifically, we shall seek answers to three questions: 1. Given the history of market returns, was the crash of ‘87 unusual? 2. How do conditional variance models such as GARCH behave around periods of extreme moves in the market? 3. What is the impact of the crash on backtesting and performance evaluation?” Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of The BARRA Newsletter, Horizon, and is reprinted here with permission.

Description: The image campaign for the actuarial profession is described. From Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 30, No. 3.

Description: Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are reshaping the insurance industry landscape. Some M&A transactions even garner wide media coverage. The presenters discuss current trends in recent M&A transactions and explore considerations for buyers and sellers leading up to the transactions.

Description: Numerous behavioral finance theories have emerged in recent years, many of which apply to insurance. The presenters look at key theories and their use in explaining, predicting and inducing behavior from the perspective of the health insurance customer journey.

Description: Interest rates steadily declining ever since the Volcker Fed tackled inflation in the early eighties. Ten years of stimulating monetary policy brought new lows. We should have braced ourselves for a return to neutrality, but that concept remains elusive. We will explore structural issues that have brought rates to these low levels and the potential impacts on the insurance business.

Description: Many of the innovations and methods required to improve retirement security exist, but have not been pulled together into an integrated solution at scale.

Description: Accurate determination of the appropriate time to retire and replace a physical asset is important for large ensembles of such assets when taken as a whole, and concerns the fate of tens of trillions of dollars in assets, such as airplane engines, vehicles, or any other kind of physical asset susceptible to obsolescence. A decision model to accomplish this is derived using the concept of actuarial present value applied to an economic theory of cost minimization. Since this is a theory coupling investor wealth creation with the long-term optimization of the use of scarce resources, it can also be offered as an economic model relevant to sustainability.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) published its first COVID-19 research brief on March 10, 2020, followed by regular updates and expansions through June 12, 2020. The comprehensive report includes a section of Key Statistics. On July 24, 2020, the SOA released a report showing updates through July 22 to selected graphs from or related to the Key Statistics section of the comprehensive report. This report provides similar updates through August 9, 2020.

Description: Appendix G is the listing of participants from the Delphi Report. Please see the SOA website Research section for the full Delphi Study of Economic Variables Report and all of the appendices.