Efficiency Analysis of the U.S. Publicly Held Insurance Industry

Abstract

This paper aims to measure and analyze the efficiency of the US publicly-held insurance industry from 2011 to 2013. The paper uses a two-stage efficiency model: (1) data envelopment analysis (DEA), a non-parametric model for measuring the efficiency of 141 panel data of US publicly-held insurance firms, and (2) stochastic Tobit regression model for determining associations between insurers' financial performance and efficiency. Three significant findings are obtained: (1) There is no evidence that US insurance firms consistently improve in efficiency over time using the input-output mix. (2) There is an overall positive significant association between insurers' financial performance and technical efficiency at a very high confidence level. (3) Type of insurance is found to have a negative and significant effect on efficiency. These new findings add empirical evidence to the efficiency analysis of the US insurance industry.