Agency Theory and Participating Policy Usage Evidence from Stock Life Insurers
研究了分红保单如何影响股份制保险公司中股东与经理人之间的激励冲突，发现其使用取决于缓解风险转移和投资不足成本与加剧经理人-股东冲突之间的权衡。
Extant literature demonstrates that participating policies mitigate shareholder-policyholder incentive conflicts in stock insurance firms. However, extending the argument in Mayers and Smith (1994), the authors formally show that participating policies also exacerbate the shareholder-manager incentive conflicts in stock insurance firms. In this article, the authors test whether hypotheses derived from agency theory explain the usage of participating life insurance policies by stock insurers. The authors' results are consistent with the argument that participating policy usage is dictated by the trade-off between the mitigation of the contracting costs of risk shifting and underinvestment, and the exacerbation of the incentive conflicts between managers and shareholders.