Scale Economies and Performance in the French Insurance Industry

The purpose of this paper is to provide for both life and non life insurance a measurement of economies of scale and an assessment of productive performance of French companies. We use a translog cost function to check the presence of scale economies and a parametric approach to construct our yardstick of productive efficiency. Our panel data covers 84 life and 243 non life companies for the period 1984–89. The main findings indicate both the existence of increasing returns to scale and a wide dispersion in the rates of inefficiency across companies. Those two results are shown to be closely linked to a number of characteristics of the companies studied, particularly their institutional form.