Adaptation and change in the Australian life insurance industry: an historical perspective

In the wake of the deregulation of the financial sector in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s the life insurance industry has undergone a period of rapid change and reorganisation. Part of this adjustment has been the move towards the integration of financial service provision and the rise of bancassurance. This paper investigates the strategies adopted by Australian life insurers as they moved into the increasingly competitive environment triggered by the lifting of government restrictions on banking practices. It compares the approach of life insurers with that adopted in an earlier period of expansion and change. During the 1950s and 1960s an influx of foreign owned insurance companies into the Australian market precipitated the diversification of domestic life insurers into other insurance markets. The catalyst for change in both cases was the change in information costs brought about by the change in the competitive environment. The experience of the Australian life insurance market would suggest that there is a link between changing information costs and changing organisational structures. However this link is circumscribed by the institutional environment.     

The life and death of the Australian permanent building societies

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permanent building societies have been important providers of housing finance in Australia. Despite their long history Australian building societies have been disappearing at a steady rate since the early 1980s as they have converted into banks or become involved in mergers. The purpose of this paper is to give a background account of the history of Australian building societies and put forward explanations for their past popularity and more recent disappearance from Australian housing finance markets.     

试析第三方支付人身险保费的法律问题

第三方付费在人身保险业务中已成为一种行业做法,本文试从第三方付费的定义及其范围入手,分析其成因、法律行为的性质、后果,并探讨了法律对第三方付费的禁止或限制性的规定及其适用性。     

Earnings management and initial public offerings: The case of the depository industry

In a typical IPO, insiders are “net sellers” of IPO shares; however, in a demutualizing thrift, insiders are “net buyers” of IPO shares. Using a sample of mutual depository IPOs, we find evidence consistent with earnings management prior to the conversion of mutual thrifts. We find on average that mutuals report lower ROA and increased loan loss provisions and loan loss reserves in the period prior to the demutualization. Using a two-stage approach, we also find that the level of discretionary loan loss provisions and discretionary reserves are positively related to both the level of insider participation in the IPO and the first-day returns to investors. Our results are consistent with management of mutual thrifts benefiting at the conversion from reduced pre-IPO earnings and book equity resulting from earnings management.     

Mortgages and bonds: The asset management practices of Australian life insurers to 1960

Recent studies of the experience of the British life insurance industry indicate that a period of transition, and the development of more diversified investment strategies, began in the interwar period. Australian life insurers lagged behind their British counterparts in the introduction of such strategies. This paper investigates why this was the case. It argues that in the Australian market there was both a lack of opportunity and incentive to broaden asset portfolios. However, this did not mean that asset management practices did not advance. Australian life offices became progressively more sophisticated in their approach to portfolio management during this period. Developments in the interwar period provided a grounding for post-war expansion into the equity market.     

构建中国反保险欺诈体系研究

在我国保险业高速发展的同时,我国的保险欺诈问题日益严峻。保险欺诈的复杂性决定了反欺诈工作单凭保险人孤军奋战是无济于事的,必须多方积极配合,构筑由保险人、保险行业、政府和社会公众全方位参与的保险欺诈防治体系。     

寿险营销渠道创新:直复营销模式在我国的应用

本文着重讨论直复营销这一创新销售模式于我国寿险业运用,并通过和传统营销模式的比较指出其优势,及我国寿险企业开展直复营销的前景与制约条件,旨在为寿险公司的营销渠道创新提供一些新思路.     

Medical professionalism in the life insurance industry

Steadily increasing competition has changed the underwriting environment in most life insurance companies. This article attempts to explore how heightened competition presents a new challenge for medical professionals employed in the industry.     

Growth, crisis and change in the insurance industry: a retrospect

The insurance industry currently finds itself in a revolutionary situation characterized, in part, by the impact of new direct marketing techniques, facilitated by new technologies; by corporate restructuring and the creation of international mega-corporations; and by the accelerating globalization of the industry. This article surveys recent research on insurance history with the aim of placing these developments in their long-run context. Three areas are examined for evidence of continuities and discontinuities with the past: namely, the impact of technology, the interaction between markets and organizational change, and the globalization of insurance and its relationship to economic growth.     

The impact of enterprise risk management on the marginal cost of reducing risk: Evidence from the insurance industry

We test the hypothesis that practicing enterprise risk management (ERM) reduces firms’ cost of reducing risk. Adoption of ERM represents a radical paradigm shift from the traditional method of managing risks individually to managing risks collectively allowing ERM-adopting firms to better recognize natural hedges, prioritize hedging activities towards the risks that contribute most to the total risk of the firm, and optimize the evaluation and selection of available hedging instruments. We hypothesize that these advantages allow ERM-adopting firms to produce greater risk reduction per dollar spent. Our hypothesis further predicts that, after implementing ERM, firms experience profit maximizing incentives to lower risk. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that firms adopting ERM experience a reduction in stock return volatility. We also find that the reduction in return volatility for ERM-adopting firms becomes stronger over time. Further, we find that operating profits per unit of risk (ROA/return volatility) increase post ERM adoption.     

新《保险法》对保险公司的影响

我国《保险法》的最新修订具有里程碑式的意义,对保险公司的组织架构、制度建设、运营行为都将产生深远的影响。从保险公司的角度来看,新《保险法》的实施可谓机遇与挑战并存,如果能够妥善地根据新《保险法》及时对自身作出适当的调整,那么保险公司的核心竞争力无疑会提升,这对整个保险行业的健康持续发展也是十分有利的。     

基于协调的保险市场与资本市场对接模式研究

本文通过比较美、英、日、德四国的对接模式发现,保险市场与资本市场的和谐对接是资金、产品和制度对接三方面的共融体,是金融市场自然演进与风险资本动态规制的最优范式结合。基于此,我国应在经济、金融微观制度基础变迁的基础上适时选择适合我国国情的可操作和可持续的对接模式。     

和谐保险监管的成本与效益均衡研究

本文主要对和谐保险监管进行了研究分析,利用经济学中的成本与效益均衡分析方法,探讨了什么样的保险监管是和谐的,得到了监管均衡区作为监管均衡目标,最后提出了实现和谐保险监管的对策建议。     

Regulatory competition and forbearance: Evidence from the life insurance industry

Regulatory separation theory indicates that a system with multiple regulators leads to less forbearance and limits producer gains while a model of banking regulation developed by Dell’Ariccia and Marquez (2006) predicts the opposite. Fragmented regulation of the US life insurance industry provides an especially rich environment for testing the effects of regulatory competition. We find positive relations between regulatory competition and profitability measures for this industry, which is consistent with the Dell’Ariccia and Marquez model. Our results have practical implications for the debate over federal versus state regulation of insurance and financial services in the US.     

Reinsurance and corporate taxation in the United Kingdom life insurance industry

There are two main tax-related arguments regarding the use of reinsurance – the income volatility reduction and the income level enhancement arguments. The income volatility reduction argument contends that firms facing convex tax schedules have incentives to hedge in order to reduce the volatility of their annual taxable income and thereby lower expected tax liabilities [Smith, C.W., Stulz, R.M., 1985. Optimal hedging policies. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 19, 127–140]. The income level enhancement argument, advanced by Adiel [Adiel, R., 1996. Reinsurance and the management of regulatory ratios and taxes in the property–casualty insurance industry. Journal of Accounting and Economics 22, 207–240], is more specific to hedging via reinsurance. This perspective holds that reinsurance enhances current reported earnings via the receipt of reinsurance commissions and so increases tax liabilities. Consequently, insurance firms with high marginal tax rates should use less reinsurance than those with low marginal tax rates if tax matters. Prior studies using data on financial derivatives have produced mixed results on the validity of the first argument, while Adiel (1996) finds the second argument insignificant in his study of the use of reinsurance by a sample of United States (US) property–liability insurance firms. This study tests the two tax-related arguments using 1992–2001 data for a sample of United Kingdom (UK) life insurance firms. We find that UK life insurers with low before-planning marginal tax rates tend to use more reinsurance; in contrast, tax convexity is found to have no significant impact on the purchase of reinsurance and so the volatility-reduction argument is not supported.     

数据挖掘技术在寿险业交叉销售中的应用

一般来说,保险公司获得新客户的成本比维持老客户的成本要高得多,因此保险公司开始更多地关注现有客户的发展,交叉销售正是挖掘现有客户的消费潜力的有效方法。本文以CRISP-DM(Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining)方法论为基础,探讨聚类分析和关联规则在寿险行业交叉销售中的应用,并结合某寿险公司的基础数据应用Clementine挖掘工具建立了交叉销售模型,帮助寿险公司有针对性地开展产品营销。     

Dividend decisions in the property and liability insurance industry: mutual versus stock companies

This article examines the effect of organizational forms on corporate dividend decisions by exploring the differences in dividend payout ratios between mutual and stock property–liability (P–L) insurers in the US. Our large sample evidence suggests: (1) mutual insurers tend to have a lower dividend payout ratio than stock insurers and the observed difference is about 4% points, holding other factors constant; (2) mutual insurers tend to adjust dividend payout ratios toward their long-run target levels more slowly than stock firms. These results are consistent with the capital constraints and/or greater agency costs of equity in mutual insurers.

The Spillover effect of compulsory insurance

The assumption usually made in the insurance literature that risks are always insurable at the desired level does not hold in the real world: some risks are not—or are only partially—insurable, while others, such as civil liability or health and workers' injuries, must be fully insured or at least covered for a specific amount. We examine in this paper conditions under which a reduction in the constrained level of insurance for one risk increases the demand of insurance for another independent risk. We show that it is necessary to sign the fourth derivative of the utility function to obtain an unambiguous spillover effect. Three different sufficient conditions are derived if the expected value of the exogenous risk is zero. The first condition is that risk aversion be standard—that is, that absolute risk aversion and absolute prudence be decreasing. The second condition is that absolute risk aversion be decreasing and convex. The third condition is that both the third and the fourth derivatives of the utility function be negative. If the expected value of the exogenous risk is positive, a wealth effect is added to the picture, which goes in the opposite direction if absolute risk aversion is decreasing.     

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