The number of insurance company has grown rapidly in Taiwan due to insurance deregulation since 1992. The main challenge insurance industry face is the declination of profit due to the increasing of competitors. The operator of insurance company is able to face this question and offer the solution, then a company has better solvency. So we explore two issue, one is to investigate the relationship between asset risk and capital adjustment decision in Taiwan¡¦s life insurance industry from 1993 to 2005, and the other is to provide some empirical evidences of retention limit of excess of loss reinsurance in Taiwan¡¦s property insurance industry. In the first issue, a life insurance company is in less risk and has better solvency when it has more capital or higher ratio of capital; however, this also brings higher opportunity cost which means in long run, the average profit will be lower. There is no conclusion how to balance the relationship between capital adjustment and risk taking decision in life insurance industry though this topic is intensively discussed these days. Therefore, with the methodology of panel data threshold regression, we divide life insurance companies into two categories according to ¡§life insurance and annuity insurance premiums to total premiums ratio¡¨. One is life insurance Company of indemnification, and the other is the one of savings. In conclusion, we identify the negative correlation between capital ratio and risk of life insurance company of indemnification and the positive correlation between capital ratio and risk of life insurance company of savings. In the second issue, because of the increase of natural disaster in Taiwan recently, the property insurance company has to face what the reinsurance companies are not willing to underwriter, so excess of loss reinsurance has become the viable solution in Taiwan¡¦s property insurance industry. We apply extreme value theory to the tail of Taiwan property insurance claim for VaR estimation and calculate retention limit of excess of loss reinsurance. The empirical results show that the distribution of Taiwan property insurance claim is fat-tailed. We suggested using Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) to model the data with extreme loss and conclude retention limit of excess of loss reinsurance.

This study explores two issues, one is to investigate the determinants of net interest margins and bank risk-taking from 1993 to 2001 in a partial universal banking system, taking Taiwan as our example, and the other is to provide some empirical evidences of exchange ratio determination of bank mergers in Taiwan. In the first topic, the partial universal banking system here is a mix of the conventional commercial banking system (whose activity is mainly loan-deposit taking) and the universal banking system (engaging in both loan-deposit and investment activities). We employ the recently developed method of the panel data threshold regression method to estimate the determinant function of the net interest margin and bank risk-taking model. It is found that the corporate governance plays an important role in explaining the recent behavior of the banking industry. The empirical results show that the net interest margins in the commercial banking system are affected by credit risk, interest rate risk, the degree of leverage and management quality, unlike the net interest margins in the universal banking system which are more sensitive to only-credit risk and the degree of leverage. Moreover, the relationship between managerial ownership and credit risk taking behavior is inverse U-shape in the commercial banking system, consistent with the corporate control hypothesis, unlike U-shape relation in the universal banking system that supports moral-hazard hypothesis. In the second topic, we not only extend Larson and Gonedes (1969) merger exchange ratio model to taking account of market risk and more participants but also apply Marsh-Merton dividend behavior reduced form (1987) to estimate the expected post-merger price-earnings ratio. Taking the first case of the bank merger according to the Financial Institution Merger Law as our sample, we find that the L-G model indicates the interval of exchange ratios that enhance, or at least not cause any diminution in the wealth positions of all parties to a proposed bank merger. Also, the bargaining area offers some information to help merger candidates to negotiate final actual exchange ratio.