It is known that due to the variability of loss reserve amount according to the choice of estimation methods and used assumptions, the executives of insurance firm can use loss reserve as a subject of accounting management at their own discretion. Although there exist many differences in characteristics and operational types among these insurance products, prior researches could not properly deal handle this feature on account of problem of the collection of data. This study first classifies insurance products run by non-life insurance companies into general, long-term, and automobile insurance, and it also empirically examines whether non-life insurance companies discretionally deals with loss reserve per product in terms of accounting management, in accordance with the size scale of net income and net assets of the company.
According to the results of this study, For each product loss reserves appeared not the same. If the size of the net income reduction has increased loss reserves underestimated potential of the automobile insurance, in the long-term and general insurance was no possibility of significantly underestimated. Since the size of the automobile insurance loss reserve is relatively large compared to the long-term and general insurance, and automobile insurance is simpler than long-term and general insurance with respect to estimation unit and control of product structure, automobile reserves is to be preferred.
If you look at the effect of the size of the net assets, a company with large amount of net assets has relatively low possibility of underestimating long-term insurance loss reserve compared to smaller-sized company, automobile insurance and general insurance in significantly not observed. We believe that the long-term insurance loss reserves is conservatively estimated, because large-scale companies have greatly increased loss reserves by such recent performance increase.