Basis risk is an important consideration when hedging longevity risk with instruments based on longevity indices, since the longevity experience of the hedged exposure may differ from that of the index. As a result, any decision to execute an index-based hedge requires a framework for (1)...

The purpose of this paper is to identify a workhorse mortality model for the adult age range (i.e., excluding the accident hump and younger ages). It applies the “general procedure” (GP) of Hunt and Blake (2014) to identify an age-period model that fits the data well before adding in a...

This article shows how mortality models that involve age effects can be fitted to ages beyond the sample range using projections of age effects as replacements for age effects that might not be in the sample. This ‘projected age effect' approach allows insurers to use age-effect mortality...

A particularly important issue in retirement income provision is longevity risk. There are two components to longevity risk. The first is the uncertainty over how long any particular pension scheme member is going to live after retirement. This is known as idiosyncratic longevity risk. Both...

This article reviews the economic theories of funded and unfunded pension systems and examines the advantages and disadvantages of each type of system; these theories help to explain the current interest in funded systems as well as the difficulties associated with the transition towards them

This Special Issue of the Annals of Actuarial Science contains 12 contributions to the academic literature all dealing with longevity risk and capital markets. Draft versions of the papers were presented at Longevity 14: The Fourteenth International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions...

The key lesson from our research and discussions is that we need a national narrative on pensions if we are going to build a consensus around retirement income provision. The alternative is to live in a Tower of Babel with any sensible messages drowned out by a cacophony of mixed and often...

Supporters of collective defined contribution (CDC) pension schemes claim that they can produce higher and more stable incomes than individual defined contribution (IDC) pension schemes. Broadly speaking, there are two types of CDC scheme in existence: one that is a form of DB replacement and...

The National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) has revolutionised the DC pension savings market in the UK by providing a high-quality benchmark for private-sector schemes to compare themselves against. We consider whether it can and should do something similar in DC decumulation, both for its own...