Interest rate guarantees seem to be included in life insurance and pension products in most countries. The exact implementations of these guarantees vary from country to country and are often linked to different distribution of investment surplus mechanisms. In this paper we first attempt to...

Public intervention in catastrophe insurance markets, supported by the donor community and the World Bank, should be country specific. Low-income countries, where the domestic non-life insurance market is undeveloped, should focus in the short term on the development of sovereign catastrophe...

This paper presents a model to assist property-liability insurance companies in making product and investment mix decisions. A quadratic programming approach is used to generate mean-variance efficient frontiers that reflect the covariability of returns on insurance lines and assets. The...

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 paper analyzes the efficiency of stock and mutual organizational forms in the property-liability insurance industry using nonparametric frontier efficiency methods. We test the managerial discretion hypothesis, which predicts that the market will sort organizational forms into market...

We use data on U.S. insurance companies to examine the validity of the conglomeration hypothesis versus the strategic focus hypothesis for financial institutions. We distinguish between the hypotheses using profit scope economies, which measures the relative efficiency of joint versus...

This paper examines the relationship between mergers and acquisitions, efficiency, and scale economies in the U.S. life insurance industry. We estimate cost and revenue efficiency over the period 1988-1995 using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The Malmquist methodology is used to measure...

This paper analyzes the accuracy of the principal models used by U.S. insurance regulators to predict insolvencies in the property-liability insurance industry and compares these models with a relatively new solvency testing approach--cash flow simulation. Specifically, we compare the risk-based...

Property-liability insurance is distributed through two major marketing channels -- the independent and the exclusive agency systems. Independent agents place business with several companies, while exclusive agents write insurance for only one company. We find that the independent agency system...