This paper extends the concept of investment efficiency from investment management structures to include strategic asset allocation and liability related issues. The concept of risk budgeting is developed. It represents a valuable way of incorporating risk and return information to produce more efficient investment decisions. Information ratio is a key measurement in the process, and it is concluded that the risk budget should be allocated based upon the marginal contribution to it for different sources of risk. Non-financial risk is also considered in terms of both governance and risk.

The text of the paper The Concept of Investment Efficiency and its Application to Investment Structures, by T. M. Hodgson, S. J. Breban, C. L. Ford, M. P. Streatfield and R. C. Urwin, together with the abstract of he discussion on it held by the Institute of Actuaries on 28 February 2000, are printed in British Actuarial Journal, 6, III, pages 451-545.

At the meeting of the Faculty of Actuaries on 19 February 2001, both papers, The Concept of Investment Efficiency and its Application to nvestment Structures and Risk Budgeting in Pension Investment, were discussed.

With-profits business has flourished for over a century as a means of providing access to equity-type investment whilst smoothing the volatility risk. Today's world demands greater transparency, and with-profits has come under increasing criticism in this regard. The Working Party concludes that it remains good value as an investment vehicle and suggests how its transparency can be significantly improved.

The paper first analyses the characteristics of with-profits, which it notes has been permitted for stakeholder pensions. It then analyses the various criticisms of with-profits and considers how they can be rebutted without destroying its essential nature, pre-supposing the implementation of the Association of British Insurers' (ABI) Raising Standards scheme.

The paper concludes that greater transparency is both necessary for rebuttal and also achievable without destroying the with-profits concept, to this end proposing a model for the internal analysis of identified classes of with-profits business and the inclusion of specified additional information in the statutory returns to the regulators. It also proposes that policyholders be given slightly more information than is specified under Raising Standards. Finally the paper analyses the implications for the life assurance industry, which it considers acceptable.

This paper discusses the use of parametric models for description of the term structure of interest rates and their uses. We extend earlier work of Cairns (1998), Chaplin (1998) and Feldman et al. (1998), by presenting new theoretical results and also by demonstrating that the same model can be applied to countries other than the United Kingdom. First, we prove that the process of fitting a yield curve to price data has a unique optimal solution in both zero-coupon-bond and low-coupon-bond markets. Furthermore, an alternative method of curve fitting to those proposed previously is shown to have a unique solution in all markets.

The restricted-exponential model has previously been applied to U.K. data (Cairns, 1998). Here, we consider its wider application in European bond markets. In particular, we analyse German market data and conclude that the same model applies equally well to both countries.