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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficiency analysis of the Indian general insurance sector using data envelopment analysis (DEA) and subsequently assess the impact (if any) of the global slowdown on the performance of the allied sector.

The paper aims to analyze the operating performance of 12 general insurance companies in India between 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 using DEA based on secondary data collected from Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority Annual Reports.

Findings clearly indicate that the global economic slowdown has severely affected the performance of the private sector companies; while the public sector companies exhibited relatively lesser variation in performance levels.

The methodology employed in the study estimates relative efficiencies without assuming any functional form; as a result the proper comparison of input utilized with the output produced is not possible. Several other tools like Malmquist Index and two-stage procedure have not been used.

The study brings into light the operating characteristics and efficiencies of the Indian general insurance sector during the global slowdown and therefore holds practical value for policy makers and practitioners as well as for the decision makers of the firms employed in the study.

Consumer behavior, in the context of general insurance, is worth exploring to formulate growth strategies for insurance sector in India in light of the proposed structural changes. Indian consumers attract global players due to untapped potential and favorable policy measures initiated for higher foreign direct investments. The purpose of this paper is to understand the prevailing level of service quality as perceived by insurance customers in India in the presence of certain contextual antecedents and moderators.

Perceptions about constructs like customer risk dispositions, awareness, past experiences, customer involvement, choice overload, service quality and satisfaction of 256 customers were collected using a questionnaire survey. A variance-based structural equation modeling helped to identify significant linkages among the constructs.

In order to assess service quality levels, a 15-item scale having the infrastructure, employees, agents and product dimensions was found valid and reliable. Choice overload and customer involvement were found to moderate the influence of antecedents and service quality, respectively. The influence of choice overload on quality perceptions is insignificant. The study concludes that the existing risk beliefs are insufficient, and experiences have less predictive contribution to quality perceptions.

Theoretically, this study examined the process of satisfaction development from service quality perceptions. This study offers insights for developing theories to portray future consumer behavior where more dependence of self-service technologies is expected to dominate service delivery mechanisms in insurance. The study informs that general insurance customers in India prefer more diversified products, more customer-centric employees/agents and better technical quality.

The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the prevailing insurance consumer behavior in the general insurance sector of India and help insurance service providers in streamlining their strategies for better insurance penetration and reduced lapse rate.

This study helps in understanding the emerging trends in general insurance buying behavior in India.

Health insurance is one of the major contributors of growth of general insurance industry in India. It alone accounts for around 29% of total general insurance premium income earned in India. The growth of this sector is important from the perspective of overall growth of general insurance Industry. At the same time, problems in this sector are also many which are affecting its performance.

The paper provides an understanding on performance of health insurance sector in India. This study attempts to find out how much claims and commission and management expenses it has to incur to earn certain amount of premium. Methodology used for the study is regression analysis to establish relationship between dependent variable (Profit/Loss) and independent variable (Health Insurance Premium earned).

Findings of the study indicate that there is significant relationship between earned premium and underwriting loss. There has been increase of premium earnings which instead of increasing profit for the sector in fact has increased underwriting loss over the years. The earnings of the sector is growing at compounded annual growth rate of 27% still it is unable to earn underwriting profit.

This study is self-driven based on secondary data obtained from insurance regulatory and development authority site.

The fact that complaints regarding general insurance claims are three times as numerous as those of life insurance claims suggests that claims behaviour of general insurers be investigated to minimize operating losses and ensure operational excellence. This paper seeks to address this issue.

Study of variance and factor analysis has been undertaken to achieve the objective of identifying factors which govern claims in general insurance business. In order to understand the dependency of claims over the sectors and segments, statistical hypothesis testing along with cross tab analysis has been conducted. The study also evaluates the relationship of these factors over the sectors and segments by running a multiple regression.

An empirical result of the study proves that there exists an association between type of sectors, i.e. public and private and segments of insurance namely fire, marine and miscellaneous. The study also suggests a claim projection model for the general insurance players.

Exclusion of specialized players due to the reason being new entrants and in order to maintain common parlance of sectors may be a limitation to this study.

The study recommends that insurance players should not treat the claims settlement strategies in isolation of segments. The claims projection model as suggested in the study may prove to be extremely helpful in projecting the claims and in turn reduce the increasing underwriting losses.

Understanding the role of financial intermediaries towards financial development and thereby the growth of an economy, this study aims to examine the long-run relationship between the development of banking and insurance sector and economic growth in India by covering different regimes including the regulated and the liberalized period.

For examining the long-run relationship between these sectors, the study uses VAR-VECM technique. Further, Granger causality test is used to check if there is the presence of any causal link among these sectors.

The findings clearly indicate long-run relationship between economic growth and the development of banking and insurance sector, while the causality results show demand following relationship in the complete period where there is bi-directional causality in the post-liberalized period from insurance to economic growth.

As banking development is not found to support economic growth, this raises serious concerns towards the complex role of banks as against theory and demands further analysis to understand their role in an economy.

As causality pattern has changed from demand following to bi-directional causality, it is vital to understand the importance of liberalization towards the economic growth of the country as well as the contribution of insurance sector towards economic growth in the liberalized environment.

This is the first effort to empirically explore the relationship between economic growth and the development of banking and insurance sector in India by covering the complete period (regulated and liberalized).

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which Indian insurance companies have adapted socially responsible reporting practices, HR disclosures and also to identify areas of corporate social reporting and HR disclosures.

The study adopts longitudinal design and has analyzed qualitative data by using content analysis in 26 insurance companies in India disclosed in annual reports. The paper focuses on annual reports of Indian insurance companies starting from the financial year 2002‐2003 to 2009‐2010, which are analyzed with regard to the nature of their human resource disclosures and social reporting. Finally, a test of legitimacy theory is then conducted.

The study found that the non‐life insurance companies disclosed significantly less social information than life insurance companies. The study also reveals that public life insurers disclosed significantly more social information than the other life insurance companies. On the other hand, a paired difference t‐test shows private general insurance companies disclose more social information as the difference significant.

The study has ignored longitudinal variations and the sample organizations comprised 26 government and private insurance organizations, restricting generalizations to the companies examined in the study.

The study recommends that a checklist of disclosures should be developed jointly by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

The study, while providing valuable insights, highlights the dearth of research of corporate social reporting in emerging economies and opens up many avenues for further research.

Key elements of disaster management are prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and relief, rehabilitation. The various stakeholders in the process of disaster mitigation are policy makers, decision makers, administration, professionals, professional institutions, R&D institutions, financial institutions, insurance sector, community, NGOs and the common man. Insurance has played a very important role. The advanced countries have developed the insurance system and made it effective and mandatory – as a result the loss of lives and property is comparatively less. In India, most of the losses suffered in natural disasters are not insured, for reasons such as lack of purchasing power, lack of interest in insurance, theory of karma attitude and ignorance of availability of such covers. Quite large numbers of agencies provide the insurance cover and foreign insurance companies have already ventured in such areas. This implies that the commercial and private sector can also play an essential role in disaster mitigation. The present study attempts to fill the gap in studies on the role of the insurance sector in disaster management.

The role of financial institutions and financial intermediaries in fostering the economic growth by improving the efficiency of capital accumulation, encouraging savings and ultimately improving the productivity of the economy has been well accepted by now. Recent studies show that the insurance industry can improve the economic growth through financial intermediation, risk aversion and generating employment. This study aims to find the relationship between life insurance industry and economic development in India.

The study uses the VAR‐VECM model to find out the long run and short run relationship (if any) between life insurance growth and economic growth along with Granger causality test to suggest any causal relationship.

This study finds that there is long term relationship between life insurance industry and economic development in India. And the Granger causality test suggests that life insurance sector improves the overall economic development in India and the reverse is not significant.

The only limitation to study the relationship between life insurance sector development and economic development is the data set which has been used is annual data as the quarterly data were not available for insurance industry.

The study documented the long run relationship between life insurance industry and economic development in India and finds that the life insurance sector improves the overall economic development in India. This would help us to understand the implications of the life insurance market development in the post reform era.

There is a dearth of literature on the Indian economy in relation to the insurance sector, specifically the life insurance sector. This is the first attempt to study the impact of life insurance development on Indian economy after the reforms initiated in the insurance sector.

This paper analyses the relationship between financial sector development (FSD) and life insurance inclusion in India during the period from 1971–1972 to 2016–2017. The study analyses the effect of financial deepening on life insurance inclusion in India.

The study employs augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) unit roots test to check the stationarity properties of the time series data. It estimates a life insurance inclusion model using the auto-regressive distributed lag model (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration.

The study finds evidence of a cointegrating relationship between financial deepening and life insurance inclusion in India. A significant error correction coefficient indicates automatic adjustments to short-run disequilibrium, reinforcing the cointegrating relationship between financial sector and life insurance inclusion.

A major limitation of the study is that it excludes the first-time sum assured (FSA) contributed by the private sector life insurance companies due to lack of data availability.

The results of the study call for faster expansion of the financial sector and provision of a low interest rate regime in the Indian economy. The study invokes the need for sufficient training to the personnel in the banking and non-banking institutions to cater to the complex needs of life insurance buyers.

The paper estimates the link between FSD and life insurance inclusion and introduces a new measure of life insurance demand, the life insurance inclusion, measured using the FSA.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate revenue efficiency performance of life insurance companies in India. The study also compares if private or public insurance sector is more “revenue efficient”. Furthermore, the study determines the nature of return to scale (RTS) and identifies the leaders and laggards amongst insurance companies operating in India.

Revenue efficiency is calculated by employing data envelopment analysis – a non-parametric approach, on a data set of 24 insurance companies over the period 2013–2014 to 2017–2018.

The empirical results suggest that life insurance companies in India could generate only 34.4% of revenue, which is very less than what these are expected to generate from the same inputs. Majority of life insurance companies operating in India are operating at decreasing return to scale (DRS). There is a reduction in leaders and the highest proportion of companies is falling in the category of laggards.

As per the best knowledge of researchers, no empirical work has been carried out with respect to measuring the revenue efficiency of Indian insurance companies. The current study appropriately fills the gap by not only calculating the revenue efficiency scores of insurance companies in India but also provides insights into the causes of revenue inefficiencies. It also gives implications for efficient and effective management of insurance companies.