Search results

The author, the European Commission’s chief of financial reporting in financial markets, argues that 2004 could be a year of crisis or a year of progress. Which it will be depends on whether financial reporting rises to the challenges which the European Commission has created. He suggests that people’s behaviors are just as important as rules in creating an effective capital market.

Solvency and market conduct regulations play a crucial role in supporting life insurance development by boosting consumer confidence and securing a stable environment for insurers to write business. The regulation encapsulates not only the legal framework but also its enforcement. This study aims to focus on the latter and investigate the impact of solvency and market conduct examinations on life insurance development within a homogenous legal environment in the USA.

To test the relationship between the regulatory examinations and life insurance development, this study uses annual data for 51 US states over the period 2013–2018 and uses fixed and random effects panel regressions controlling for the possible omitted variables bias and serial correlation. This study constructs two groups of indicators to measure the robustness and ability of regulators to prevent insolvencies and opportunistic market practices and estimate their effects on market development.

The results show that more stringent regulators with respect to solvency examinations deter life insurers from their markets and channel to those markets with lenient examiners, hurting the development of life insurance in the stringent states. Additionally, regulators boost consumer confidence by providing robust market conduct practices, which results in higher life insurance demand.

This study contributes to the debates about the pros and cons of the current state-led regulation in the USA and the general benefits/costs of regulation for insurance market development.

Swedish legislators and financial reporting regulators have experienced the vagaries of legislating EC Directives into their statutes. By changing their mind about including “true and fair” in the auditor’s report regulators have drawn attention to the need for an override provision if financial reality is to be presented in the annual accounts. It appears that global companies with headquarters in Sweden will continue to reconcile their Swedish accounts to US or International GAAP in order to present their companies in a comparable manner even though these could contravene the mutual recognition of accounts mandate issued by the EC.