This paper investigates the cost efficiency and competitive behaviour of the non-life - or property and casualty - insurance market in the Netherlands over the period 1995-2012. We focus on the 2006 health care reform, where public health care insurance has been included in the non-life...

This paper demonstrates that the level of competition in the existing Panzar Rosse (P-R) literature is systematically overestimated and that the tests on both monopoly and perfect competition are distorted. This is due to the use of bank revenues divided by total assets as dependent variable in...

The Panzar-Rosse test has been widely applied to assess competitive conduct, often in specifications controlling for firm scale or using a price equation. We show that neither a price equation nor a scaled revenue function yields a valid measure for competitive conduct. Moreover, even an...

This paper is the first detailed and world-wide investigation of the developments in banking competition during the past fifteen years. Using the Panzar-Rosse approach, we establish significant changes over time in the competitiveness of the banking industry. The changes in competition over time...

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market...

This paper investigates competition in the Dutch non-life insurance industry indirectly by measuring scale economies and X-inefficiency, assuming that strong competition would force insurance firms to exploit unused scale economies and to push down inefficiencies. We observe substantial...

A well-performing life insurance industry benefits consumers, producers and insurance firm stockholders alike. Unfavourable market conditions stress the need for life insurers to perform well in order to remain solvent. Using a unique supervisory data set, this paper investigates competition and...