An Empirical Study Of Influencing Factors Of Capital Structure Of Life Insurance Enterprises In China

With the acceleration and increase of population aging, per capita income and urbanization, China’s life insurance industry has got great potential. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in life insurance premiums makes debt levels increase significantly and capital exhaustion accelerate. Under the current context of limited financing channels, there is an increasingly prominent lack of life insurance solvency and an inappropriately high level of capital structure. Therefore, it is really of great importance to conduct studies about the influencing factors of capital structure so as to optimize the capital structure.To begin with, this paper clarify the basic meaning of the capital structure, and on this basis, this paper makes an systematic combed and analysis of the classical capital structure theory and the related literature of the capital structure of the insurance company.Then, it examines the characteristics of the capital structure of China’s life insurance companies from the aspects of current situation of life insurance company capital structure, the comparison of capital structure between life insurance and property insurance companies and the comparison of capital structure between China and foreign life insurance companies. We can see that the unique financing paths of China life insurance companies:The premium income improve asset-liability ratio, at the request of the solvency regulation, by increasing the profits retained in the internal financing, supplemented by the subprime mortgage and additional equity for external financing.Finally, Based on25samples of China life insurance companies from2004to2012, this paper employs Fixed Effect Model and the Feasible Generalized Least Squares Method (FGLS) to examine the effects of the macroeconomic factors, regulatory factors, corporate characteristics, and insurance business factors, etc on the capital structure of China life insurance companies. According to the results of the empirical study, it shows that rapid macroeconomic growth, loose monetary policy and solvency regulation will improve the capital structure of life insurance and that a reduction of the premium income growth and surrender rate and an increase of corporate profitability and fixed assets ratio will lower the standard of the capital structure of the life insurance company. On this basis, suggestions are given on the optimization of the capital structure of China’s life insurance companies at the end of the paper.