TITLE
Ownership Concentration and Governance in the U.S. Insurance Industry," James Barrese, Gene Lai, and Nicos Scordis, Spring 2007, Volume 30, No. 1-20. Full-text articles soon will be available through ABI/INFORM and EBSCO. Entire article in Acrobat format.

ABSTRACT
Concentration in the U.S. insurance industry’s market shares and ownership, coupled with a network interlocking ownership relationships by institutional investors, raise social concerns. Studying the relationship between Tobin’s q and corporate governance features of the industry, we fail to find support for the incentive alignment or entrenchment hypotheses, but our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that controlling owners may couple with others to expropriate private value from minority shareholders. An interesting observation from the study is the degree to which family control is prevalent in the industry; combining family control and institutional ownership makes most stock insurers closely held.