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...

th This book is published to commemorate the 50 Anniversary of the S.S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education. Administered at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Huebner Foundation was established in 1941 to strengthen insurance education at the collegiate level by increasing the number of professors specializing in insurance and enriching the literature in the field. The financial support of leading life insurance companies has enabled the Foundation to provide post-graduate education for prospective insurance teachers and scholars. Through its fellowship program,...

Two different applications have been considered, automobile claims from Massachusetts and health expenses from the Netherlands. We have fit 11 different distributions to these data. The distributions are conveniently nested within a single four parameter distribution, the generalized beta of the second type. This relationship facilitates analysis and comparisons. In both cases the GB2 provided the best fit and the Burr 3 is the best three parameter model. In the case of automobile claims, the flexibility of the GB2 provides a statistically siE;nificant improvement in fit over all other...