This study explores the relational conditions that influence contractors’ safety management on multi-employer worksites, with a focus on the Swedish mining industry. Using interviews, observations, and informal conversations, the study examines how the blurred boundaries between client companies and contractors shape safety practices. The findings show that safety management is influenced not only by formal contractual relationships but also by the relational dynamics between social actors, where power asymmetries and informal networks play a significant role. The research highlights how these relational conditions – defined by the positions and symbolic authority of the actors involved – impact coordination, communication, and accountability regarding safety. Contractors, often struggling to assert their expertise and legitimacy within the relational field, face challenges in aligning safety practices with client companies’ priorities. The study concludes that to improve safety management on multi-employer worksites, it is essential to address the relational dynamics between contractors and client companies, moving beyond formal agreements to consider the underlying power relations and position-takings that shape safety practices.

The fast-moving field of data science is increasingly permeating into the health and care actuarial sciences. Given this context, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries set out to form a “techniques in data science in health and care” working party. This working party was tasked with creating a framework for those actuaries working within the health and care domain that would assist them in determining which techniques are appropriate for a project. The framework presented here was developed through a combination of literature review and synthesis of expert opinion from experienced practitioners from diverse backgrounds. The framework offers a structured, itemised approach, serving as a checklist to ensure that all relevant analytics and decisions are considered and documented. Each itemised topic is covered by a summary providing guidance and relevant references for further reading. The checklist follows the natural workflow of a data analytics project, guiding users through each step to prevent omissions and maintain rigour in both analysis, reporting and peer-review. The framework blends relevant analytics elements from actuarial science, data science and epidemiology. We hope the framework will enhance transparency, reproducibility, and comprehensiveness in the reporting and peer-review of health and care data analytics projects.

This paper investigates how the historical institutional legacies of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires affect present-day attitudes toward women and minorities in Romania. We conduct a thorough historical analysis which shows that the institutional setup in the Ottoman part of Romania was more favourable toward women and minorities compared to that in the Habsburg part. Using the 2016 round of the EBRD-World Bank Life in Transition Survey, we find that these differences in historical institutions have long-run impacts on attitudes today. While we find mixed support for our hypotheses when it comes to gender attitudes, consistent with our expectations, men and women in ex-Habsburg locations report that women have less decision-making power in the household and are less tolerant towards people of different races, gay people, and Jews. The paper has important implications for advancing the debate on long-run imperial legacies by highlighting their persistent impact on women and minorities.

In this paper, we investigate how policyholder information and broader economic conditions jointly influence the duration of credit life insurance contracts in the French market. Employing a proportional-intensities regression framework built on inhomogeneous phase-type distributions, we capture the way covariates shape the distribution of policy lifetime until a lapse occurs. The model is estimated via a specialized expectation-maximization algorithm, adapted to handle censored data, covariates, and feature selection through shrinkage. Our analysis of real-world data shows that different policyholder attributes and economic factors can significantly alter lapse behavior, with effects varying across insurance products, individuals, and economic cycles. These findings highlight the importance of integrating both individual-level and macroeconomic indicators in lapse risk assessment, ultimately informing more accurate pricing and allowing for improved risk management strategies.

Insurance risk arising from natural catastrophes such as earthquakes is a key component of the minimum capital test for federally regulated property and casualty insurance companies. This paper proposes an integrated, open-source, simulation-based actuarial framework for the assessment of earthquake insurance risk and solvency capital requirements. The framework combines spatio-temporal earthquake occurrence modeling, physics-informed ground-shaking estimation based on Canadian seismic hazard maps, building exposure and vulnerability modeling, and detailed insurance loss and claim calculations within a unified pipeline. Spatial heterogeneity in seismic risk is captured through kernel-based spatio-temporal point process modeling, while Voronoi-based deviance residuals are employed as localized diagnostic tools to validate model adequacy. Simulated insured losses are used to estimate regional and country-wide probable maximum losses (PMLs), and a new capital aggregation formula is proposed that explicitly incorporates cross-provincial dependence in earthquake losses, in contrast to the current region-based regulatory aggregation. The proposed framework enables spatially resolved loss and capital assessment at a fine geographic scale and is implemented in a fully reproducible open-source environment. An interactive web application is also provided to allow users to simulate earthquake damage and the resulting financial losses and insurance claims at user-specified epicenter locations.

This paper explores changes in the commissioning, contracting and provision of NHS-funded cataract surgery in England over the last decade, focusing on the growing role of independent sector providers (ISPs). In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in NHS-funded cataract surgery (from almost 417,000 cases in 2018/19 to about 650,000 in 2023/24) with the ISP share increasing from 22 to 57 per cent. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining quantitative analysis of over 4.6 million NHS-funded hospital admissions for cataract surgery (2013–2024) and qualitative interviews with senior NHS and ISP stakeholders. Interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The shift to ISPs was largely unplanned, driven by long NHS waiting lists, favourable payment tariffs, and low barriers to entry for new providers. ISPs’ involvement has contributed to reduced waiting times and improved productivity, potentially due to specialised infrastructure and incentive structures. However, concerns exist about contract management, service quality, and value for money. The study highlights the need for improved service commissioning, tariff reform, stronger contractual oversight, and effective monitoring to ensure quality and value. These findings have broader implications for healthcare systems balancing competition, patient choice, and public–private delivery models in elective care.

Wheat protein is essential to end-use products including bread and noodles. Protein levels vary based on weather, growing conditions, and production practices. This research identifies and quantifies the relationship between wheat prices and protein levels for seven Kansas crop reporting districts during 2001–2023. Results of a quadratic panel regression model demonstrate that local wheat prices are influenced by both (1) the absolute level of wheat protein in the local Crop Reporting District and (2) the local level of wheat protein relative to the overall wheat protein level in the rest of the State.

This study investigates a hybrid variable annuity (VA) contract that combines guaranteed minimum accumulation benefit (GMAB) and guaranteed minimum death benefit (GMDB) riders, with the added flexibility for policyholders to surrender prior to maturity. The contract guarantees the return of premiums or a greater rolled-up value at either maturity or death. We propose a novel two-account structure: an investment account tied to the underlying fund, from which management fees are deducted, and a separate cash account for the deduction of insurance fees for funding the GMAB and GMDB riders. This design generalizes the conventional single-account model by decoupling fee sources. From the policyholder’s perspective, we derive actuarially fair insurance charges and show that the two-account framework delivers substantially lower guarantee fees compared to the classical design, improves contract characteristics by reducing the effective moneyness of embedded guarantees, thereby discouraging early surrenders and mitigating mortality risk mispricing. Furthermore, we show that bundling survival and death benefits results in higher fair fees than the sum of standalone riders, thereby enhancing the product’s appeal to insurers. The analysis also incorporates taxation considerations up to a predefined preservation age, reflecting regulatory and practical product design constraints.