Summary:
With the transformation of China's economy from high-speed development to high-quality development, China's insurance industry has gradually stepped into the stage of high-quality development. In the long-term development of China's insurance industry, problems such as information asymmetry, moral hazard, and adverse selection always exist in the insurance market, and insurance disputes frequently occur due to the inconsistency between the maximum utility goal of consumers and the maximum benefit goal of companies. The objective existence of insurance consumers' rights and interests infringement has hindered the high-quality development of the insurance industry. Insurance consumer protection is one of the goals of insurance regulation and also a symbol of healthy development. In the past, research on consumer rights was mainly studied in insurance consumer rights system and legal system, while lacking empirical research. This paper studies the effect of the insurance consumer complaint hotline on insurance Company performance. This study complements the literature on consumer protection and corporate finance in the field of insurance. Based on the panel data of 163 Insurance companies in China from 2009 to 2018, a quasi-natural experiment was designed using the insurance consumer complaint hotline as an exogenous policy variable. Specifically, we establish a difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the impact of the insurance consumer complaint hotline on insurance company performance and its influence mechanism. The individual grouping variable of this paper is divided based on the data of insurance letters and visits in 2011, in which the insurance companies with a larger number of letters and visits in 2011 are regarded as those with poorer protection of consumer rights and interests. The time grouping variable in this paper is divided based on the year 2012. The time grouping variable multiplied by the individual grouping variable is the DID variable, which is also the key independent variable. The main dependent variables in this paper are proxies of company performance, including sales, market share, and ROA. The results show that the opening of the insurance consumer complaint hotline significantly reduces the performance of insurance companies with poor consumer rights and interests protection. Further, this study finds that the higher the commission incentive level, the more significant the negative impact of insurance consumer complaints on company performance. Unsuitable high commission system is easy to make insurance sales staff ignore consumer rights and interests, making it difficult to eliminate the sales misleading phenomenon. The high commission is the promotion factor of insurance consumer's rights infringement and increases the difficulty of insurance consumer's rights protection. Through heterogeneity analysis, this paper finds that the results between life insurance companies and property insurance companies are different. Although life insurance companies are also affected by consumer complaints, the consumer complaint hotline has a more significant negative impact on property insurance companies which with poor consumer rights and interests protection. The results enrich the theory of consumer rights and insurance company governance and have important guiding significance for the practice of insurance consumer protection and the high-quality development of the insurance market.
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