For property-liability insurers, we find that insider ownership, cash-flow rights, and
the presence of outside directors have positive impacts; concentration of ownership,
deviations between voting rights and cash-flow rights, board size, and the presence of
CEO duality have negative impacts. The empirical evidence from the life insurance
industry, in contrast, is generally insignificant. The lack of a significant relationship
between corporate governance structure and firms’ performance among life insurers
may result from the substantially high ownership holdings and concentration across
life insurance companies.Thus, our results seems to imply that as ownership in family
groups becomes overly dominant, as it has among life insurers, other corporate
mechanisms lose their effects. In addition, the relationship between insider ownership
and firm performance may be influenced by the control level of cash-flow rights,
though we find opposite results for life insurers and property-liability insurers.
Specifically, the relationship between insider ownership and firm performance is
positive when insider ownership and cash-flow rights are relatively low (e.g., property-
liability insurers) but negative when insider ownership and cash-flow rights are
relatively high (e.g., life insurers).