Insurance Institutional Ownership, Corporate Resilience, and Sustainable Development: Evidence from Chinese A-Share Firms

Enhancing the resilience of real-economy firms is essential to sustainable development because firms must not only absorb shocks but also maintain long-term adaptive and renewal capacity. Against this background, this study examines whether insurance institutional ownership, as a form of patient capital, is systematically associated with corporate resilience. Using panel data for Chinese A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2024, we construct a multidimensional corporate resilience index based on risk resistance, adaptive recovery, and renewal and development and estimate two-way fixed-effects models. The results show that insurance ownership is positively associated with the baseline corporate resilience index, and this pattern remains qualitatively similar when we examine stock-return volatility, financial performance growth, and a stricter capability-oriented resilience index. The positive association is stronger for state-owned enterprises, small firms, non-manufacturing firms, and firms located in northern China. Channel analysis suggests that insurance ownership is associated with lower agency costs, stronger internal controls, greater external scrutiny, and lower financing constraints, patterns that are consistent with the proposed channels linking insurance ownership to corporate resilience. Further analyses show that higher insurance ownership and increases in insurance holdings are associated with stronger resilience, whereas decreases in holdings are associated with weaker resilience. Long holding duration is negatively associated with resilience, suggesting that performance-evaluation pressure may weaken the long-term governance role of insurance capital. Overall, the findings suggest that insurance investors may support corporate resilience and, when governance incentives and evaluation mechanisms are appropriately aligned, contribute to the sustainable development of the real economy.