Title: A review of the empirical literature on the determinants of insurers' financial performance

Authors: Ashwag Alsofiani

Addresses: Economic and Finance Department, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia; Azman Hashim International Business School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Malaysia

Abstract: This paper aims to provide a literature review in the field of the determinants of insurers' financial performance. This paper took a qualitative approach to examine 30 scholarly articles from 18 countries in four geographic regions. The results provided a list of 17 common financial performance determinants found out of various studies. These determinants included 14 firm-specific determinants (company size, leverage, liquidity, company age, premium growth, underwriting risk, tangibility, risk ratio, retention ratio, loss ratio, expense ratio, growth rate, claim ratio, and solvency margin) and contained three macroeconomic determinants (inflation rate, economic growth rate and interest rate). Also, the results indicated that the return on asset (ROA) is the most financial measurements used as dependent variables. Furthermore, the results revealed that many of the empirical studies employed multiple regressions and it was discovered that the fixed effects model was an appropriate model. The paper is limited to the insurance sector only.

Keywords: financial performance; firm-specific; macroeconomic; insurers; determinants; literature review.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2022.123622

International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 2022 Vol.30 No.3/4, pp.478 - 487

Received: 07 May 2019
Accepted: 10 Mar 2020
Published online: 30 Jun 2022 *

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