Insurance Company Governance Empirical Study Of The Impact On Business Performance

Insurance company is the special enterprise with "risk management" as the main function in the market economy. The level and rationality of risk management ability have the direct impact on the firm performance. In the modern corporate governance framework, the behavior, risk preference and management efficiency is decided and affected by the governance structure, and ultimately reflected in the firm performance indicators. It is due to the particularity of objectives, products, capital structure and the supervision mechanism that the corporate governance has a special mechanism of action and influence on the firm performance. This paper mainly studies the various impacts for the insurance corporate governance on the firm performance, in order to provide the suggestions to perfect insurance corporate governance in China.Compared to the domestic and foreign economic studies focusing on the general corporate governance, the domestic studies on the insurance corporate governance and the firm performance is quite a few. The research literature not only less and less in-depth, but also no perfect theoretical analysis framework. The theoretical research hindered the insurance practice. Insurance in China as "exotic", experienced the different periods including foreign input, national insurance industry development, false prosperity, takeover, closure, restore and marketization. Since the recovery on domestic business in 1980, especially after the join to WTO as the leading opening financial sector, China insurance industry has make the huge economic and social achievements. By continually pushing for the reform process of the insurance industry and accelerating the opening of the insurance market, to strengthen the corporate governance become the urgent requirement of the establishment and improvement of modern enterprise system as well as promoting the competition and sustainable development of the whole insurance industry.With the change of the financial institutions from the role of "controller" to "controlled" in the corporate governance, we synthesized to make use of the corporate governance theory and financial intermediary theory. A systematic analysis on the particularity of the insurance company as a financial intermediary in the corporate governance reflects the common governance requirements of the stakeholders, including strengthening of risk prevention, control of solvency, protection of the policy holders' interests, coordinating the relationship between the government supervision and the market mechanism. And the analysis framework of the insurance corporate governance theory is constructed. At the same time, in full consideration of the international specification requirements and the various models, with reference to the corporate governance environment in China, the ideal model in corporate governance of China insurance company is put forward, which is primarily based on the outsider model with the board of directors as the core, complemented by the insider model with the board of supervisors as the major supervisor to maintain the stakeholders'interests.Based on the theoretical analysis, this paper periodically lists the transformation of insurance corporate governance from "government governance" to "economic governance" and statistical analyzes the status for Chinese insurance company in 2009. Meanwhile, the performance evaluation system of insurance company is constructed. At the request of the characteristics of the insurance company and stakeholders' common governance, the data of Chinese property insurance company in 2009 is empirical processed using the method of stepwise regression. The following empirical results are achieved. In the equity structure, the proportion of state-owned shares has significant positive effect. The equity concentration and the proportion of foreign capital stocks has significant negative effect. Foreign shareholders with technical and managrial advantages also failed to play an expected role. In the structure of board of directors, the scale has significant negative effect. The bigger scale increases the cost of coordination and organization and reduces efficiency of the board of directors. Due to the questionable independence, the proportion of the independent directors also has a negative effect. The proportion of women directors with careful way and professional background has significant positive effects. For the board structure, the duality of chairman and general manager has significant positive effects. The professional committee has no significant effects, further explained that the board construction is still in a "compliance" stage. The incentive mechanism of senior executives has a negative effect, but not dramatically. It is related to the present status which lack of long-term effective supervision mechanism and performance evaluation institutions. The transparency of the information disclosure has a positive effect. The high quality information disclosure help stakeholders to understand the development of the insurance company so as to reduce the information asymmetry, and to improve the management level and reduce the cost of capital so as to eventually improve the firm performance. Finally, this paper draws the following policy suggestions to improve the insurance corporate governance as well as the firm performance, which respectively are further optimization of equity structure by introducing the private capital and foreign strategic investors, to construct the board of directors with a powerful management, to perfect the incentive and restraint mechanism linked to the long-term profitability and future performance, to strengthen the supervision function of the board of supervisors by independent supervisors system, to improve the authenticity and transparency of information disclosure to all stakeholders, to set the linkage of the external supervision mechanism, and to focus on the management control and excessive intervention risk of shareholders.