Wei Zhang

Objectives: Based on incentive theory of motivation, this paper aims to estimate China's basic pension insurance's annual efficiency and inter-period efficiency changes from 2015 to 2019 and further examine the relationship between official tenure and basic pension insurance governance performance.Methods: The DEA—BCC model was used to evaluate the operating efficiency of basic pension insurance in 31 provinces of China. And four panel Tobit models were constructed to examine the heterogeneous linkages between officials' tenure and governance efficiency in different regions of China.Results: The results showed that there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between the official tenure and the governance efficiency of basic pension insurance. The younger an official was in his current position, the more apparent the inverted U-shaped relationship between the tenure of an official and the governance efficiency of basic pension insurance. We also found that localized government officials showed better governance efficiency of basic pension insurance. However, as the term of office of officials increased, the governance efficiency of non-localized officials showed a steeper negative effect.Conclusion: This study firstly reveals a significant relationship between the characteristics of officials and the operation of China's basic pension insurance system, which is a complement to the study of China's basic pension systems.

This paper aims to measure the operating efficiency of 22 Chinese domestic and foreign-funded life insurance companies from 2013 to 2017 and outline the path to achieve high-quality development. The DEA-Malmquist was used to evaluate the total factor productivity on the sample of 22 Chinese domestic and foreign-funded life insurance companies. A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was also used to analyze the configuration of determinants affecting technical efficiency. The results show that the overall operating efficiency of life insurance companies in China is relatively satisfying. The changes in total factor productivity are mainly caused by changes in technical efficiency and changes in efficiency. However, changes in scale efficiency have little effect on Chinese domestic and foreign-funded life insurance companies. There is a significant difference in the operating efficiency between Chinese domestic and foreign-funded life insurance companies. In contrast, the operating efficiency is slightly higher than that of foreign-funded life insurance companies, which is mainly reflected in the difference in pure technical efficiency. The realization path of a life insurance company’s operating efficiency is primarily composed of high employee education and low overclosing ratio, high employee education and low reinsurance ratio, and all-factor positive investment. The weak employee quality and excessive overclosing are the main reasons for the low operating efficiency of some enterprises. This paper systematically analyzes the impact of the organization’s internal structure on the operating efficiency of life insurance companies. Finally, based on the configuration perspective, we explain the internal logic and path of achieving better operating efficiency. In the end, we also provide decision-making references for further improving the efficient operation of life insurance companies in China.

Purpose: This paper aims to measure the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance from 2014 to 2019 in 31 provinces. Methods: The three-stage DEA model was used to evaluate the operating efficiency of basic pension insurance in 31 provinces. Results: On the whole, the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance was at a high level, but there was still room for improvement. GDP, urbanization level and scale of government public expenditure had a positive impact on the operating efficiency of regional basic pension insurance. In contrast, the old-age dependency ratio had a significant negative effect. There were noticeable regional differences in the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance, which showed a pattern of Central (0.742) >Eastern (0.689) >Western (0.505) after removing the influence of environmental variables. Conclusion: This study systematically analyzes the impact of external environmental regulations on China’s basic pension insurance’s operating efficiency and provides decision-making references for further improving the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance. In order to further optimize the allocation of basic endowment insurance, this paper proposes the following countermeasures and suggestions: (1) broaden investment channels and improve the investment efficiency; (2) increase supervision of social security departments and strengthen information disclosure; (3) unify the management of social basic pension insurance.

We investigate whether financing constraints affect the size distribution of Chinese industrial firms from 1998 to 2007. Although the firm size distribution does not follow Zipf distribution in China, it is approaching Zipf distribution over time. In general, financing constraints have a robustly negative effect on the size distribution of firms. Furthermore, firms in Western China grow significantly more equally after controlling for financing constraints. However, the effect of financing constraints in Central China is significantly negative, and the effect of financing constraints on firm size distribution in Eastern China is insignificant. We thus expect a non-linear relationship between financing constraints and firm size distribution.