Defined terms for the annuity market and lifetime income landscape.
SOA mortality research is the body of mortality experience studies and table development conducted by the Society of Actuaries, which produces the canonical mortality tables used across US life insurance pricing, pension valuation, and actuarial regulation.
The socioeconomic mortality gradient is the consistent empirical finding across developed populations that individuals at higher socioeconomic positions live longer than those at lower positions, with the difference in US life expectancy roughly 10–15 years between top and bottom deciles.
A survival curve is a graphical or tabular representation of the share of a starting cohort still alive at each successive age, declining from one at the entry age to zero at the oldest age any member reaches.
Systematic longevity risk is the population-level risk that the mortality assumptions underlying a lifetime income arrangement prove wrong because the entire reference population lives longer — or, less commonly, shorter — than was assumed.
