Department of Insurance and of Finance Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan.
Abstract:
In this paper we study whether the insurer’s optimal liquidity exists and how and when insurer adjusts to optimal liquidity if it exists. We employ a pooled time-series and cross-sectional data for U.S. property-liability insurance industry reported from 2006 to 2010 and implement a partial adjustment model, which is proposed by Byoun 2008) and Dang, Garrett, and Nguyen (2011), to examine our main issues. The empirical results indicate that insurers tend to have a targeted liquidity and adjust toward their target liquidity over time, which is consistent to Venkiteshwaran (2011). In addition, asymmetric partial adjustment does exist for insurers with above-target or below-target liquidity as well as with high- or low-leverage. The evidence indicates that the adjustment speed of below target liquidity is faster than above-target liquidity, which is consistent to the financial pressure hypothesis. Nevertheless, the speeds of partial adjustment for insurers with high- and low-leverage support distinct hypotheses in terms of different liquidity measurements.
