Title: Determinants of performance of Tunisia insurance companies: case of life insurance

Authors: Abdelkader Derbali; Lamia Jamel

Addresses: Higher Institute of Management of Sousse, University of Sousse, 22 Street Ahmed Hamza, Sahloul 1, Sousse 4054, Tunisia ' Department of Economics, Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management of Sousse, Sousse University, Tunisia

Abstract: Business performance has attracted researchers' attention in the previous literature of corporate finance. However, in the framework of the life insurance sector, they have given a number of attentions. In our paper, we investigate empirically the effect of firm-specific characteristics (size, leverage, tangibility, risk, growth, liquidity and age) on the profitability of eight Tunisian insurance companies during the period of study from 2005 to 2015. The empirical results show that the variables size, age and growth are the most important determinants of the performance of Tunisian insurance companies as measured by return on asset ratio. Then, leverage, tangibility, liquidity and risk do not affect the performance of Tunisian insurance companies.

Keywords: performance; life insurance; insurance companies; return on asset; ROA; panel data; Tunisia.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2018.093452

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2018 Vol.24 No.4, pp.531 - 542

Received: 08 Feb 2017
Accepted: 10 Apr 2017
Published online: 26 Jul 2018 *

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