The paper reviews the underwriting of life assurance and sickness benefits today. It considers both medical and non-medical aspects and how the extra risks should be costed. The paper also deals with financial underwriting. reassurance and the management of death claims. Although the paper presents a ‘state of the art’ picture, it also considers advances via on-line acceptance, expert systems and computer-based training.

The paper considers a number of methods of estimating the work time lost due to sickness, unemployment and stoppages. The most satisfactory approach suggested is based on a multiple state working life table. Numerical examples of the measurement of work time lost are provided for particular application to the actuarial assessment of damages (arising out of personal injury or fatal accident). Other applications, including the pricing of unemployment insurance, are also discussed.

The paper presents a theoretical framework for the valuation of a general insurance company to actuaries, but also aims to provide reference work for non-actuarial users of appraised values. It distinguishes between the price that may be paid for an insurance operation from what may be called the economic or appraised value. The paper describes the elements of the appraised value calculation, selection of parameters, the uses of such evaluations and explores the future development into explicit stochastic modelling rather than the implicit methodology. Theoretical and practical considerations are illustrated and example valuations of a single line insurer are given.

This note considers the mortality table functions, and shows that the usual formulae hold under less restrictive assumptions than those usually made. The foundations of the theory of multiple-decrement tables are also considered, in the context of probability theory.

The paper addresses the problem of estimating future claim payments from the ‘run-off’ of past claim payments. A model of the claim payment process is postulated. Results from risk theory are applied to give a model for the incremental paid claims data by development period. A fitting method is developed which takes account of the error structure of the data implied by the underlying model of the claim payment process. The application of a similar method to incremental incurred data is considered. A numerical example is given.