Integration and convergence in efficiency and technology gap of European life insurance markets
运用元前沿数据包络分析和经济增长趋同概念，研究了1998-2014年10个欧盟人寿保险市场在效率和技术差距上的整合与趋同，发现成本/收入效率和技术差距均呈趋同趋势，但全球金融危机减缓了成本效率方面的整合进程。
Abstract This paper applies the meta-frontier Data Envelopment Analysis and the main concepts of convergence from the economic growth literature (β-convergence and σ-convergence) to analyze integration and convergence both in efficiency and in technology gap of European Union (EU) insurance markets. We evaluate 10 EU life insurance markets over the 17-year-period 1998–2014. Results show convergence in cost/revenue efficiency among major EU life insurance markets during the sample period. These findings indicate that the least efficient countries in 1998 have shown a higher improvement in cost/revenue efficiency than the most efficient countries in the same year as well as that the dispersion of the mean efficiency scores among EU life insurance markets decreased over the sample period. We also find convergence in cost/revenue technology gap among these markets, suggesting that they become more technologically homogeneous during the sample period. However, results show that the global financial crisis has led to a slowdown in the progress of integration and convergence in efficiency and technology gap of EU life insurance markets in terms of cost efficiency but not in terms of revenue efficiency.