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Accounting for equity investments of life insurance companies *
Author(s) -
BOYLE PHELIM P.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
contemporary accounting research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.769
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 1911-3846
pISSN - 0823-9150
DOI - 10.1111/j.1911-3846.1985.tb00373.x
Subject(s) - equity (law) , actuarial science , life insurance , accounting , ranking (information retrieval) , business , economics , computer science , machine learning , political science , law
. This paper deals with the accounting for equity investments by a life insurance company. Various procedures for recognizing unrealized changes in market values of securities in its investment portfolio are analyzed. These range from direct recognition of market values to the method currently employed by Canadian life insurance companies which involves extensive smoothing. Summary statistics are suggested that describe the properties of the resulting accounting numbers obtained from various smoothing procedures. These summary statistics are viewed as compact, cost effective ways of summarizing the effects of the procedures for financial statement readers. The second part of the paper describes how a particular user group can obtain a ranking among various accounting alternatives. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (Saaty 1980) is proposed for combining the judgments of different individuals into a group preference. The feasibility of the method is illustrated using a small pilot study to rank various proposals concerning the accounting treatment of life insurance companies' equity investments.