Characteristics of common stock holdings of insurance companies

This article investigates the stock market portfolios of insurance company portfolio managers and compares the characteristics of their equity holdings with those of other (noninsurance) institutional equity portfolios. The main finding is that the cross-sectional determinants documented by earlier researchers for aggregate institutional ownership levels in firms do not have the same explanatory power for levels of ownership of insurance companies. On the other hand, these same firm characteristics have significantly high explanatory power regarding the decision of insurance companies to invest in a firm.