This paper investigates economies of scope in the US insurance industry over the period 1993-2006. We test the conglomeration hypothesis, which holds that firms can optimize by diversifying across businesses, versus the strategic focus hypothesis, which holds that firms optimize by focusing on...

This article introduces a new approach, cross-frontier analysis, for estimating the relative efficiency of alternative organizational forms in an industry. The technique is illustrated by analyzing a sample of stock and mutual property-liability insurers using nonparametric frontier efficiency...

This article gauges and analyses different types of efficiency in the Korean construction industry for the period 1996 to 2000, which includes the country's economic crisis. We also identify several important factors of the efficiency change and provide some managerial implications for the...

The objective of this paper is to provide new information on the performance of efficiency estimation methods by applying a wide range of econometric and mathematical programming techniques to a sample of U.S. life insurers. Average efficiencies differ significantly across methods. The...