This paper takes a contingent claim approach to the market valuation of equity and liabilities in life insurance companies. A model is presented which explicitly takes into account the facts that the holders of life insurance contracts (LICs) have the first claim on the company’s assets whereas equityholders have limited liability, that interest rate guarantees are common elements of LICs, and ...

This paper investigates how defined benefit pensions deficits/surpluses influence UK company valuation under the fair value accounting regime that became mandatory in 2006 with the introduction of IAS 19. Using a sample of FTSE firms from 2006 to 2012 we find that reported pension deficits significantly reduce the market value of a company, with the market valuation of deficits being larger tha...

We investigate the applicability of divisible residuated lattices (DRLs) as a general evaluation framework for soft constraint satisfaction problems (soft CSPs). DRLs are in fact natural candidates for this role, since they form the algebraic semantics of a large family of substructural and fuzzy logics [GJKO07, Háj98]. We present the following results. (i) We show that DRLs subsume important v...

The market for structured financial products in Switzerland ranks among the largest in the world. A unique characteristic of the Swiss market is that its most successful products are reverse convertibles on multiple assets with conditional capital protection (multiple barrier reverse convertibles, MBRC). In other countries, an active market only exists for simpler types of reverse convertibles....

This paper studies the joint effect of conservatism and aggregation on the cost of equity capital and the efficiency of debt contracts. In the model, a firm’s two assets are valued at either the lower-of-cost-or-market or fair value and the accounting report aggregates the value of the two assets. While the process of aggregation leads inevitably to a loss of information, what information is lo...

The fair valuation of complex financial products for credit risk transfer (CRT) can provide a good basis for sustained growth of these markets and their recovery after the current financial crisis. Therefore, the risks of these structured credit securities (such as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) and Credit Default Swap-Index tranches) have to be known as well as the investor’s current ri...