Single Market Effects on Productivity in the German Insurance Industry
Posted: 14 Nov 2009 Last revised: 5 Feb 2012
Date Written: July 1, 2010
Abstract
The Single Market project of the European Commission was supposed to foster productivity growth in the financial service industry. We assess its consequences on productivity development in the German insurance industry, one of the largest insurance markets within the European Union, by applying Data Envelopment Analysis to a panel of German insurance companies. We estimate standard and bootstrapped efficiency scores for the years 1991 through 2006 and apply a test on scale efficiency based on bootstrapped statistics. Furthermore, we compute a Malmquist index and test for different types of productivity convergence across firms.
Keywords: Single Market, Bootstrapped data envelopment analysis, Productivity growth
JEL Classification: L50, G22, C14
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