Papers and reports

This Report is intended to consolidate the material already made available to the profession in the first three AIDS Bulletins, as a more permanent record of the first phase of activity of the AIDS Working Party, and to provide some supplementary material and references.

The publication last year of the English Life Table No. 14 enables my earlier paper (Daw, 1982) to be extended to include the latest table.

Attempts to incorporate regression-like models into life-table analysis would appear to have gone largely untried by the British actuarial profession. Essentially this is because in life insurance, data bases are large and the establishment view is that such models are inappropriate when sampling variation is small. Also mortality is of less significance as a factor than economic variables like inflation and investment earnings. All the actuary needs to do is not understate the level of mortality rather than get it exactly right. The purpose of this paper is two-fold.