An Evaluation of the Degree of Competition in the French Life Insurance Industry

Résumé

This article focuses on the life insurance industry in France and attempts to shed light on whether the insurers behave in a competitive fashion, or whether, on the contrary, they take coordinated decisions. We propose several empirical tests, which entail the estimation of the Boone indicator, a tool which explores the relationship between firms’ relative costs and profits, the evaluation of the switching costs beard by consumers when they decide to change insurer, and the construction of a structural model, which is based on an oligopolistic framework where insurers propose differentiated products. Our results suggest unambiguously that firms do follow a competitive behavior.