In the mandatory health insurance market in Switzerland, a range of insurers offer policies that differ in characteristics like premium and service level while benefits are the same and regulated by law. In this paper, we give an overview of the market and analyse the relationship between...

Using state-of-the-art frontier efficiency methodologies, we study the efficiency and productivity of Swiss insurance companies in the life, property/casualty, and reinsurance sectors from 1997–2013. The broad scope of this study provides an opportunity to compare and cross-check the findings...

In this paper we investigate several tests for the hypothesis of a parametric form of the error distribution in the common linear and nonparametric regression model, which are based on empirical processes of residuals. It is well known that tests in this context are not asymptotically...

In the classical linear regression model the problem of testing for symmetry of the error distribution is considered. The test statistic is a functional of the difference between the two empirical distribution functions of the estimated residuals and their counterparts with opposite signs. The...

This paper describes a moments estimator for a standard state-space model with coefficients generated by a random walk. This estimator does not require that disturbances are normally distributed, but if they are, the proposed estimator is asymptotically equivalent to the maximum likelihood...

Abstract Multivariate regression models and ANOVA are probably the most frequently applied methods of all statistical analyses. We study the case where the predictors are qualitative variables and the response variable is quantitative. In this case, we propose an alternative to the classic...

Abstract This note reviews basic techniques of linear path analysis and demonstrates, using simple examples, how causal phenomena of non-trivial character can be understood, exemplified and analyzed using diagrams and a few algebraic steps. The techniques allow for swift assessment of how...