ABSTRACT

The study investigated the effect of underwriting capacity on the performance of insurance firms in Nigeriafor the period 1990 to 2022. The autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) method was employed for the analysis of data and the findings obtained indicated that insurance investment rate have significant positive impact on insurance performance in the short run in Nigeria. However, in the long run, all the variables failed the 5 percent level of significance. This mean that insurance premium, investment rate, penetration rate and interest rate do not significantly impact insurance firms’ performance in the country in the long run. The study conclude that investment rate as measures of underwriting capacity is very crucial to the overall performance of insurance firms in Nigeria in the short run and not in the long run. The study recommends among others that management should ensure that current investment level of insurance companies is improve upon by properly investing funds collected from premium to profitable and assets yielding ventures. This is very key to the overall improvement of income level of insurance companies, and by so doing strengthen their underwriting capacity.