Unregulated Corporate Financial Disclosure and Analysts’ Forecast Properties: The Case of Embedded Value Reporting by Life Insurers
研究了寿险公司自愿披露内含价值（一种不受监管的市场公允价值指标）与分析师盈利预测准确性和离散度的关系，发现披露内含价值能提高预测准确性并降低离散度。
This paper investigates the association between life insurers’ voluntary disclosure of embedded value (EV), an unregulated market-driven fair value measure, and analyst forecast accuracy and dispersion. EV is an estimate of the present value of future net cash flows from in-force life insurance business. Advocates of this disclosure believe that EV is a better measure of economic performance than traditional GAAP measures. Others argue that corporate management has discretion in estimating and reporting EV. Further, analysts may have access to information that allows the development of possibly more accurate estimation metrics in the absence of EV disclosure. It is then an empirical issue to determine whether EV disclosure has any incremental effect on analysts’ forecast properties. Using a multi-country setting, we find that EV disclosure is positively associated with analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy and negatively related to forecast dispersion. This result is consistent with the alternative hypothesis that disclosure of EV provides a richer information set that enriches analysts’ forecasts beyond their own in-house developed surrogates. As guidance for insurance accounting and disclosure evolves, our findings support the value of continuing to provide EV information to the public.