Using state-of-the-art frontier efficiency methodologies, we study the efficiency and productivity of Swiss insurance companies in the life, property/casualty, and reinsurance sectors from 1997–2013. The broad scope of this study provides an opportunity to compare and cross-check the findings from other countries, across different time periods, and across different subsectors. Moreover, we are ...

Deregulation and widespread economic changes have fundamentally affected the business environment of European life insurance companies over the last decades. We apply multi-stage data envelopment analysis to identify the impact of the changing environment on productivity and efficiency of European life insurance companies. Considering a sample of 960 life insurance companies from 14 European co...

one of the most challenging problems in our country insurance industry is the phenomenon of increase of loss pay average time by insurance companies. a lot of research and analysis have been conducted on both the roots and possible solutions for this problem, none of which has had success in annihilating it. this paper presents a discrete model ) nonlinear mathematical model ( of insurance serv...

In this study, I use panel data from municipal Japanese National Health Insurance (JNHI) insurers to estimate their financial efficiency scores using nonparametric methods and to estimate the causal effects of structural and regional characteristics on the efficiency scores consistently using econometric methods. The major findings of this study are as follows. First, the estimated efficiency s...

This paper integrates elements from the theory of agency, the theory of property rights and the theory of finance to develop a theory of the ownership structure of the firm. We define the concept of agency costs, show its relationship to the ‘separation and control’ issue, investigate the nature of the agency costs generated by the existence of debt and outside equity, demonstrate who bears cos...