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Conditional Conservatism, Regulation, and Insolvency Risk

Authors: Juan Zhang;

Conditional Conservatism, Regulation, and Insolvency Risk

Abstract

We develop a new method of assessing conditional conservatism using more detailed data available from the insurance industry. We look at how conditional conservatism affects insolvency risk and the financial strength rating of property-liability (P&L) insurance companies. We also investigate how a change to accounting rules affects conditional conservatism. The P&L insurance industry is a perfect setting for studying accruals because we have specific and detailed firm-year level information about loss accrual development. The data enable us to develop a new method of measuring conditional conservatism, which is based on the concavity of the loss development curve. We study U.S. domiciled P&L insurance companies from 1995 to 2015. We find that the greater the degree of conditional conservatism, the lower is insolvency probability, and the better is the financial strength rating, with other things being constant. The result indicates that regulators and rating agencies reward insurers that voluntarily utilize conditional conservatism accounting strategy. Moreover, we find that the level of conditional conservatism is reduced after the enactment of the Model Audit Rule (MAR). MAR, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404, increased board oversight of internal risk management. Our result provides evidence that complying with additional disclosure requirements reduces P&L insurers’ incentives to use conditional conservatism to mitigate regulatory monitoring costs.

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Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
1
Average
Average
Average
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