The first part of this study presents a number of structural tests of the production technology of life insurance companies in the U.S. using multi-product cost function. The sample firms exhibit overall and product specific economies of scale, as well as, pair wise cost complementaries between the life insurance and annuities lines of businesses and between the life insurance and accident and health lines of businesses.
Major challenges for life insurance companies have been posed by an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions in the insurance industry and the emergence of non-traditional competitors such as banks, mutual fund companies and investment advisory firms. This is the first book to analyze the determinants of firm performance in the life insurance industry by identifying the `best practices' employed by leading insurers to succeed in this dynamic business environment. The book draws upon data from insurer financial statements as well as upon an extensive survey of life insurer management practices and strategic choices in distribution systems, information technology, mergers and acquisitions, human resources and financial strategies. Generic strategies such as cost leadership, customer focus, and product differentiation are analyzed as well as strategic practices specific to the insurance industry. Best practices are identified by measuring the economic efficiency of insurers and by comparing firms across the industry. Both cost and revenue efficiency are measured relative to best practice efficient frontiers consisting of the industry's dominant life insurance firms. Economies of scale and the effects of mergers and acquisitions on efficiency are also analyzed. Financial strategies are examined with specific reference to pricing policy, valuation of assets and liabilities, and the current state of firm-level risk management systems. The benchmarks established are the result of extensive fieldwork that identifies key financial risks and methodologies to both measure and manage them at the firm level. The results discussed in the book indicate that firm performance is significantly correlated with management practices and strategic choices. Thus, life insurers can improve profitability by adopting optimal combinations of strategies. The book contains important new material on the effects of strategic choices in product distribution systems, information technology, mergers and acquisitions, human resources, and financial risk management policies. In the area of efficiency, the methodology provides a new approach for identifying peer groups of insurers and measuring the performance of individual insurers relative to their peer group. On the topics of risk and pricing, new insights are offered relative to current methodologies and in regard to areas where improvement is clearly warranted. The book concludes with an analysis of the future opportunities and challenges in the life insurance industry facing managers, and the strategic options available to them to cope with these changes.
In the complex, highly developed U.S. life insurance industry, regulation emphasizes prudence and solvency and does not inhibit competition and innovation. But because there are no satisfactory measures of efficiency and profitability, it is difficult to assess industry performance.
This graduate text develops production theory from a set of reasonable axioms. The theory is presented both in a primal and dual as well as in an indirect (constrained) framework. The basic model leads to a set of efficiency measures which can be readily employed in empirical work. A first draft of the text was used to teach students at Vanderbilt University. The text includes a variety of exercise problems.
This paper explores insurance as a source of financial system vulnerability. It provides a brief overview of the insurance industry and reviews the risks it faces, as well as several recent failures of insurance companies that had systemic implications. Assimilation of banking-type activities by life insurers appears to be the key systemic vulnerability. Building on this experience and the experience gained under the FSAP, the paper proposes key indicators that should be compiled and used for surveillance of financial soundness of insurance companies and the insurance sector as a whole.
A sequel to his frequently cited Cost and Production Functions (1953), this book offers a unified, comprehensive treatment of these functions which underlie the economic theory of production. The approach is axiomatic for a definition of technology, by mappings of input vectors into subsets of output vectors that represent the unconstrained technical possibilities of production. To provide a completely general means of characterizing a technology, an alternative to the production function, called the Distance Function, is introduced. The duality between cost function and production function is developed by introducing a cost correspondence, showing that these two functions are given in terms of each other by dual minimum problems. The special class of production structures called Homothetic is given more general definition and extended to technologies with multiple outputs. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This new edition of the Handbook of Insurance reviews the last forty years of research developments in insurance and its related fields. A single reference source for professors, researchers, graduate students, regulators, consultants and practitioners, the book starts with the history and foundations of risk and insurance theory, followed by a review of prevention and precaution, asymmetric information, risk management, insurance pricing, new financial innovations, reinsurance, corporate governance, capital allocation, securitization, systemic risk, insurance regulation, the industrial organization of insurance markets and other insurance market applications. It ends with health insurance, longevity risk, long-term care insurance, life insurance financial products and social insurance. This second version of the Handbook contains 15 new chapters. Each of the 37 chapters has been written by leading authorities in risk and insurance research, all contributions have been peer reviewed, and each chapter can be read independently of the others.
Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company "Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" —legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy—which thousands of executives are already using—is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies. Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success. "This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." —Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V. The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition. This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia. "A different kind of book—I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." —Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America
