There is a growing literature that employs nonparametric frontier methods in order to evaluate the performance of investment funds. This paper proposes an integrated approach for analyzing the efficiency and performance of mutual funds. The methodology combines data envelopment analysis (DEA)...

The recent years have been extremely difficult for banks. Competition has increased and, in addition, last year the global financial market crisis hit the industry, from which many banks did not recover yet. As a consequence, financial institutions are looking for ways to cut costs and to...

A data processing procedure, DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) is described as as an analytical tool in audit engagement. DEA receives data inputs from from financial statements of a plurality of clients, constructs efficiency frontiers and evaluates relative income efficiencies. DEA can be used...

The question of how to assess research outputs published in journals is now a global concern for academics. Numerous journal ratings and rankings exist, some featuring perceptual and peer-review-based journal ranks, some focusing on objective information related to citations, some using a...

The effective management of uncertainty and complexity in premium pricing and reserve accumulation processes provide new challenges to the decision- and policy- makers. In this regard, the implementation of complex mathematical tools and advanced statistical techniques is highly acquired. Over...

We provide a tutorial that illuminates the aspects which need to be considered when fitting neural network regression models to claims frequency data in insurance. We discuss feature pre-processing, choice of loss function, choice of neural network architecture, class imbalance problem, balance...

This analysis compares the cost efficiency of Islamic and conventional insurers operating in eight countries. We analyze data collected from 32 insurers using stochastic frontier analysis, data envelope analysis and a partial frontier approach with order-alpha free disposal hull. We compare the...

This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining the efficiency and competitiveness of the Takaful insurance. We employ the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute the efficiency of Takaful operators, while Panzar-Rosse (P-R) H-statistic method is used to evaluate the degree of...

In actuarial risk theory, the introduction of dividend pay-outs in surplus models goes back to Bruno de Finetti (1957). Dividend strategies that can be found in the literature often yield pay-out patterns that are inconsistent with actual practice. One issue is the high variability of the...

In actuarial risk theory, the introduction of dividend pay-outs in surplus models goes back to Bruno de Finetti (1957). Dividend strategies that can be found in the literature often yield pay-out patterns that are inconsistent with actual practice. One issue is the high variability of the...