关键词: 保险公司, 对外开放, 风险承担, 外资持股, 境外投资

Abstract: While the opening-up of China's insurance industry enhances its competitiveness, it may also intensify the risks faced by insurance companies. For one thing, as foreign insurance companies have comparative advantages in terms of management mode and technology, opening-up may result in fiercer market competition to Chinese insurance companies, which will force them to take higher risks in order to cope with the competition. For another, considering that the international competitiveness of China's insurance companies is still weak, blind overseas expansion may lead to greater market risks, political risks and policy risks, and even transmit international financial risks.
In this context, this paper empirically examines the correlation between the opening-up and the risk-taking level of insurance companies based on the micro data of Chinese insurance companies from 2017 to 2019. The empirical results show that the increase of both the foreign ownership and the overseas investment significantly enhances the risk-taking level of insurance companies. Possible reasons are as follows: (1) There are great differences in business philosophy and objectives between Chinese and foreign shareholders, leading to greater friction between shareholders. Therefore, the higher the percentage of the foreign ownership, the higher the operating costs and risks of insurance companies, which eventually manifests itself in an increase in the risk-taking level of insurance companies; (2) The risk control technology of Chinese insurance companies is still relatively lagging behind, which makes it difficult to effectively prevent market risks, policy risks and political risks faced in the process of the overseas investment. As a result, when expanding the proportion of the overseas investment, the risk of insurance companies will increase. Meanwhile, the robustness test by excluding the influence of large insurance companies and the endogeneity test based on PSM method show that the findings of this paper are robust and credible.
Then, this paper differentiates the nature of insurance companies and risk types for further analysis. By distinguishing the nature of enterprises, the empirical results find that the foreign ownership and the overseas investment have a significant negative relationship with the Z-value of life insurance companies. However, the impact on the Z-value of property insurance companies is not significant, indicating that the positive effect of the opening-up on insurance companies' risk-taking is mainly reflected in life insurance companies. In addition, by distinguishing risk types, the empirical results find that the foreign ownership is positively related to the leverage risk and negatively related to the underwriting risk and the investment risk, indicating that a higher percentage of the foreign ownership will aggravate the leverage risk, but can reduce the underwriting risk and the investment risk. The relationship between the percentage of the overseas investment and the leverage risk and the investment risk is not significant, and it has a significant positive relationship with the underwriting risk, indicating that an increase in the percentage of the foreign investment will lead to an increase in the underwriting risk of insurance companies.
The findings of this paper have important policy implications. Firstly, although it introduces advanced business concepts and management models to China's insurance industry, it is important to guard against the risks that opening-up brings to China's insurance companies. Secondly, opening-up has a greater impact on the risk-taking of life insurance companies, so the regulatory authorities need to focus on the risk faced by life insurance companies in the process of opening-up to avoid the formation of systemic risks. Moreover, the international financial market is more complex compared to the domestic market, and insurance companies need to strengthen their risk prevention and risk hedging when making overseas investments so as to avoid suffering stronger market risks, political risks and policy risks, etc. Finally, the supervision of China's insurance industry should continuously improve the level of risk monitoring and strengthen the cooperation of international insurance supervision in order to avoid the continuous increase of risks in China's insurance industry due to the opening-up.

Key words: Insurance Company, Opening-up, Risk Taking, Foreign Ownership, Overseas Investment