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Stephen Richards

Managing Director

Articles written by Stephen Richards

(H)arms race

I'm not a fan of the hyperbolic use of military metaphors in civilian life.  However, in rare cases they do seem appropriate, and the ongoing SAR-Cov-2 pandemic provides an example.  After all, describing a worker as "front-line" seems justified when the occupation carries a materially increased risk of infection and death (SAGE, 2021).

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Buy versus build

If you are in the business of pricing and managing longevity risk, you need software to help you perform your analysis. You have two choices:

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A pandemic retrospective

The former UK prime minister Harold Wilson famously said that "a week is along time in politics". One wonders what he would have made of the coronavirus pandemic.
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An abundance of clots?

As David Spiegelhalter (2021) points out, blood clots happen all the time: "at least 100 every week" in a population of 5 million.
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Allowing for reporting delays

In a previous blog I outlined my six-month rule of thumb for discarding mortality experience affected by reporting delays. However, this can be awkward where there is a hard limit on how far back the experience data goes. For example, when a pension scheme switches administrator, or an insurer migrates business from one system to another, past mortality data is usually the first casualty.

Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: OBNR

Reporting delays

When performing a mortality analysis, it is my practice to disregard the most recent six months or so of experience data. The reason is delays in the reporting and recording of deaths, i.e. occurred-but-not-reported (OBNR) to use the terminology of Lawless (1994). We use the term OBNR, rather than the more familiar term IBNR (incurred-but-not-reported); IBNR is associated with "cost-orientated" delay distributions of insurance claims (Jewell, 1989), whereas we are focused on just the delay itself.

Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: OBNR, Filter information matrix by tag: IBNR, Filter information matrix by tag: right-truncation, Filter information matrix by tag: interval censoring

Visualising data-quality in time

In a recent blog I defined the Nelson-Aalen estimate with respect to calendar time, rather than with respect to age as is usual.
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: data validation, Filter information matrix by tag: missing data, Filter information matrix by tag: Nelson-Aalen

Visualising covid-19 in experience data

As 2020 edges to a close, life-office actuaries need to set mortality bases for year-end valuations. An obvious question is what impact the covid-19 pandemic has had on the mortality experience of their portfolio? One problem is that traditional actuarial analysis was often done on the basis of annual rates, whereas the initial covid-19 shock was delivered over a period of a couple of months in early 2020 in Europe.

Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: mortality shocks, Filter information matrix by tag: coronavirus

Going negative

In the past I have occasionally written about the oddity that is a negative yield. At that time, very short-term yields on Swiss government debt were negative. Since then the negative-yield phenomenon has only spread further
Tags: Filter information matrix by tag: annuities, Filter information matrix by tag: PRA