Variance Vision Statement

Variance aims to be a valuable and practical tool for new actuaries starting out as well as for more experienced actuaries looking to expand their skills. This means that: 1. Variance’s target audience will be practicing P&C actuaries and papers will focus on theoretically sound, practical solutions to problems facing P&C actuaries. 2. Topics will be relevant to P&C actuarial work, including P&C actuarial science, risk management, catastrophe modeling, and capital modeling. 3. Variance papers must be comprehensible to a majority of practicing actuaries. Advanced math will not be ruled out, but if a paper is likely to be understood by very few readers, step-by-step instructions will be necessary. Highly theoretical papers will be published occasionally, but these will be the exceptions. 4. Papers must exhibit a solid theoretical foundation based on adequate and current scientific literature and contain guidance on how to apply such methods in practice. In addition to papers presenting new approaches and techniques, survey and similar papers focusing on such a foundation will also be considered.

Frequently Asked Questions

Variance is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the Casualty Actuarial Society to disseminate original practical and theoretical research in casualty actuarial science. Membership in the Casualty Actuarial Society is not a requirement for submitting papers to the journal and submissions by non-CAS members are encouraged. Please read our Guidelines for Submission for more information. Why did Variance move to a new platform? In an effort to improve our digital and online presence, Variance was moved from a website based platform to an academic journal management system, improving the overall user experience and greatly increasing article discoverability by scholarly search engines. What is different between the new site and the old?

Scholastica will typeset the journal in full HTML, with articles still being available as a PDF download. Previously they were only available as PDF’s.
Articles will be more accessible on all mobile devices and more adaptable than PDF allows.
Users will be able to view and use supplemental materials such as R code more easily and download all datasets included in articles.
Articles can be found either under the articles tab or under the issue they appeared in All Articles are now searchable by topic, there was no search on the previous site.

Where have the older volumes of Variance gone? We are working on transitioning all of the previous issues of Variance to the new site. In the interim, they are currently housed in the CAS research database. Over the next few months, issues will be transitioned to the new html typeset format and will appear on the new website. Previous issues of Variance will remain in the CAS research database even after they are transitioned to the html typeset. Where are the Articles in Press? Articles in Press now live under the articles drop down on the website.

Objective Bayesian Estimation of the Mean of Severity and Frequency Distributions