Transparency and relevance of the overall result for the financial information of insurance companies.

Summary This thesis presents the concept of comprehensive income and discusses its application to insurance companies. It does so from the point of view of capital allocation, seeking the interest of this format for the evaluation, readability and transparency of accounts. The first part of the paper places the construction of profit at the heart of accounting but shows that the financial information of insurance companies is marked by strong contractual and prudential imperatives that have led to the generation of specific accruals. The policy of releasing results from the corporate accounts is smooth and highly restrained. The second part presents the global result as the result of an accounting orthodoxy based on the exhaustiveness of the balance sheet, the valuation at fair value, the relationship of clear increase in equity and a principle of separation of recurring and one-off elements. IAS-IFRS have already taken accounting several steps towards the implementation of comprehensive income, even if their application to insurance has been accompanied by inconsistencies and questionable accounting options. Accounting according to the principles of comprehensive income has unparalleled qualities of timeliness and transparency. It improves the statistical link between stock market data and accounting data. Our tests conducted on US data show a statistical link with dividends that is as good for total income as for net income. Finally, simulations of accounts confirm the previous results and show that small additional elements of total income indicate good asset/liability management.