보험산업의 하방 경직적 원가행태에 관한 연구

A traditional assumption for cost behavior is that the relation between costs and volume is symmetric for volume increases and decreases, but recent studies of cost behavior reported the cost stickiness. Cost stickiness is that cost increase more with increases in activity volume than they decrease with falls in activity volume. This study analyzed empirically whether the cost stickiness exists also in the insurance industry, which is a part of the financial industry, and whether the degree of cost stickiness is differentiated according to the level of firm's solvency margin ratio. The empirical results are as follows. First, the result of empirical test using the model proposed by a previous study shows that there is an asymmetric cost behavior in the domestic insurance industry. In other words, domestic insurance company's expenses decrease generally less when insurance premium falls than they increase when insurance premium rises by an equivalent amount. Second, the degree of cost stickiness is higher in the company which have a high level of solvency margin ratio than in the company which have a low level of solvency margin ratio. These results suggest that when the firm is free from the restrictions on solvency margin, firm's bearable range of expense ratio increase is able to be broad and the autonomy of management policy making in which the expectation for the future increase of sales reflected is able to be rise to higher level.