Estimating the Cost of Equity Capital For Property-Liability Insurers

This paper presents new evidence on estimates of the cost of equity capital by line of insurance for the property-liability insurance industry. To do so we obtain firm beta methodology to decompose the cost of capital by line. We obtain beta estimates using both the standard one-factor CAPM model as well as the Fama-French three-factor cost of capital model. The analysis suggests the cost of capital for insurers using the Fama-French model are significantly higher than estimates based upon the CAPM. In addition, we find evidence of significant differences in the cost of equity capital across lines, indicating that the use of a single company-wide cost of capital is generally not appropriate.