Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/23444 
Year of Publication: 
2007
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper Series: Finance & Accounting No. 180
Publisher: 
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
Mutual insurance companies and stock insurance companies are different forms of organized risk sharing: policyholders and owners are two distinct groups in a stock insurer, while they are one and the same in a mutual. This distinction is relevant to raising capital, selling policies, and sharing risk in the presence of financial distress. Up-front capital is necessary for a stock insurer to offer insurance at a fair premium, but not for a mutual. In the presence of an owner-manager conflict, holding capital is costly. Free-rider and commitment problems limit the degree of capitalization that a stock insurer can obtain. The mutual form, by tying sales of policies to the provision of capital, can overcome these problems at the potential cost of less diversified owners.
Subjects: 
ownership structure
insurance
owner-manager conflict
capital
default
JEL: 
G22
G32
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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