The X-Efficency Level of Italian Asset Management Companies

This paper analyses the X-efficiency level of Italian Asset Management Companies (AMC). This topic seems really important since there is a huge amount of literature that deals with X-efficiency with regard to the banking system; the aim of these works is to discover which factors can improve the level of efficiency of the intermediaries and to compare them on an international basis. Despite that, the asset management sector has been never studied from this point of view, probably because of the lack of a common model able to capture the particular production process of these intermediaries and also because of the lack of data. Our work wants to fill this gap with an empirical analysis that illustrates the peculiarities of the production process of Asset Management Companies and offers some results about the level of X-efficiency that characterizes this sector. The empirical model proposed in this work is based on the well known technique named Stochastic Frontier Approach that compares each subject of the sample with an efficiency frontier evaluated with an econometric model. Our results reveal that the AMC sector has many possibilities to improve its business by reducing costs while, on the contrary, the high level of competition denies the possibility to enhance revenues. The Italian AMC industry is characterized by the presence of a huge number of intermediaries with different size and our model reveals that bigger companies are not always the most efficient