Concluding remarks
This article captures the effects of key person insurance on the salaries of employees, the outputs, the profits and the risk of firms. Interestingly, we argue that key person insurance decreases the salaries of employees and the profits of firms. Importantly, key person insurance reduces the risk of firms coming from the uncertainty of key persons. This article develops the theory of key person insurance, which fills in an existing gap in this topic, and supports the theory of the decisionmakers of firms and insurance companies. Moreover, we assume that this theory, along with a competitive insurance market, can easily extend to other situations. By considering market power, the effects of key person insurance are amplified, which we do not investigate in this article. The main limitations of this study are that we ignore the principalagent problem, or we assume that the objective of the key person is consistent with the firm and only one key person is taken into account. Moreover, because of lack of data, we cannot launch an empirical research. Therefore, some topics for further research arise. On the one hand, under firm theory, a key person's objective may not be consistent with the firm's profits, which makes it interesting to investigate the framework of firm theory. On the other hand, it is interesting to consider multiple key persons and the corresponding effects of key person insurance for further study. In addition, to reduce the risk, governments may subsidize key person insurance. It is also very important to address this type of subsidy, such as in Nie et al. (2017), Chen et al. (2017).
