地理分散性對企業績效與風險之影響

Abstract

地理位置一直在企業的區位選擇上扮演的很重要的角色，此一影響在新經濟地理理論上更是發展出規模遞增、空間聚集以及路徑依賴三大重點；但現今網路經濟的盛行，運輸成本降低，地理位置已非如過去重要，因此想探究地理分散性是否依舊會對公司造成影響。 在過往文獻中，多將研究領域放在銀行控股公司的地理分散性或是產品的分散性對於公司績效以及風險的影響，然而，對於美國產險業而言，集團的地理分散性之於母公司績效以及風險影響卻鮮少有人探討的議題。因此，本研究以2017年美國境內產險公司為樣本，探討地理分散性對於公司績效以及不同風險所帶來的影響。 實證結果發現，不論是在公司經營績效表現亦或是不同種類的風險，地理分散性皆呈現非顯著的結果，推測的原因係因為樣本的選擇限制，導致必須刪掉許多地址不完全的子公司；以及因為網路經濟使成通訊及運輸成本降低而造成地理位置不再那麼的重要，這些是本研究推論結果不顯著的原因。 因本研究除標準差使用2010~2017年統計資料算出外，其餘財務資訊年份皆只採用2017年，因此未來延伸方向可考慮採用更多年份以求將經準地裡分散性效度。

Geographical location has always played a very important role in the choices of location of the enterprises. This influence is more imperative in the theory of New Economic Geography, such as increasing scale of output, spatial aggregation and path dependence. However, since Network Economy is prevalent,the reduction in transportation costs and the geographical location are not as important as in the past, so I want to explore whether geographic diversification still affects the company. In the past literature, the research focus is on the geographic diversification of bank holding companies or the impact of product diversification on performance and risk of companies. However, for the US property insurance industry, the geographic diversification of the groups are rarely discussed. Therefore, this study uses the 2017 US domestic insurance companies as a sample to explore the impact of geographic diversification on company performance and different risks. The empirical results show that geographic diversification has non-significant results, whether in the company's business performance or different types of risks. The reason for the speculation is that due to the selection of the sample, many subsidiaries with incomplete addresses which must be deleted,and because the Network Economy lower the communication and transportation costs, the geographic location is no longer such important. These are the reasons why the inference of this study is not significant. Since this study uses the statistics from 2010 to 2017 to calculate the standard deviation, the rest of the financial information year is only used in 2017, so the future extension direction may consider adopting more years in order to achieve the dispersive validity in the standard.