The Informational Content Of Voluntary Embedded Value (EV) Financial Disclosures By Canadian Life Insurance Companies During The Recent Period Of Market Turmoil

Abstract

The informational content and relevance to external stakeholders of voluntary financial disclosures by commercial banks is now becoming more widely recognized. For instance, banks voluntary disclosures of liquidity, interest rate and market risk metrics have been found to be closely associated with market value of equity and credit ratings. So far, there has been very scarce published research on investigating the informational content and relevance to external stakeholders of voluntary financial disclosures by life insurance companies during the recent period of market turmoil. In order to improve upon this situation, this paper updates previous findings and reports on the informational content of voluntary embedded value (EV) financial disclosures by Canadian life insurance companies during the 2000-2010 time period. As opposed to traditional statutory balance sheet and earnings reporting, EV voluntary disclosure attempts to estimate the present value of future earnings generated by a life insurers current book of various insurance businesses. The preliminary results presented in this study indicate that recent EV voluntary financial disclosures failed to communicate intrinsic informational content and to provide value relevance to external stakeholders in the sense that they were not found to be closely associated with life insurers market value of equity and credit ratings during the recent 2007-2010 period of market turmoil.