Robust SURE estimates of profitability in the Egyptian insurance market

Abstract

This paper proposes three robust estimators (M-estimation, S-estimation, and MM-estimation) for handling the problem of outlier values in seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) models. The SURE model is one of regression multivariate cases, which have especially assumption, i.e., correlation between errors on the multivariate linear models; by considering multiple regression equations that are linked by contemporaneously correlated disturbances. Moreover, the effects of outliers may permeate through the system of equations; the primary aim of SURE which is to achieve efficiency in estimation, but this is questionable. The goal of robust regression is to develop methods that are resistant to the possibility that one or several unknown outliers may occur anywhere in the data. In this paper, we study and compare the performance of robust estimations with the traditional non-robust (ordinary least squares and Zellner) estimations based on a real dataset of the Egyptian insurance market during the financial year from 1999 to 2018. In our study, we selected the three most important insurance companies in Egypt operating in the same field of insurance activity (personal and property insurance). The effect of some important indicators (exogenous variables) issued by insurance corporations on the net profit has been studied. The results showed that robust estimators greatly improved the efficiency of the SURE estimation, and the best robust estimation is MM-estimation. Moreover, the selected exogenous variables in our study have a significant effect on the net profit in the Egyptian insurance market.