Summary: | 博士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 財務金融學院博士班 === 102 === The research aims to examine the relationship between market structure, diversification, and performance of life insurance companies. The empirical findings confirm the SCP hypothesis and suggest that the degree of industrial concentrations the main factor of influencing performance.
In this study, we found that life insurance companies benefits from capital diversification, while the product diversification has a non-significant impact on the performance. We also find that the larger the firm capital is, the better the scale economies effect is, which higher the performance leads to the lower costs.
In order to analyze the different characteristics of life insurance companies, the insurances companies are categorized into three groups: top eight and non-top eight; holdings and non-holdings; and domestic and foreign life insurance companies. We discovered the top eight insurance companies have a concentration products strategy, while the non-eight companies use diversification strategy in capital allocation. The holdings insurance companies increase performance by investment. It is also found that the longer the non-financial holdings insurance companies are founded, the worse the performance is. As for both domestic and foreign life insurance companies, high market share shows no positive effects on their performance.
Finally, we use discriminant analysis to categorize the three groups (top eight and non-top eight; financial holdings and non-financial holdings; and domestic and foreign life insurance companies) in our model. Among all the models, the top eight and non-top eight discriminant analysis model is the best for prediction. Furthermore, the three variables of return on assets (ROA), firm capital size (SIZE) and LA variables show 91.4 percent of the companies could be correctly classified.
|