محمدرضا میری لواسانی

One of the most important factors of the development of an economy is the mergers or acquisitions (M&A) at the level of its active companies such as insurance companies. The main purpose of this study is to examine the efficiency of merger and acquisition before doing this process in the insurance industry using network data envelopment analysis and can select the companies that potentially facilitate achieving the purposes of the merger and acquisition process and improve of this action. For this purpose, in this study, first the efficiency of 20 insurance companies was measured through the Modified Slack-Based Measure (MSBM) in the two-stage data envelopment analysis approach during three years 2017, 2018 and 2019. Then, considering the calculated efficiency, Asia Insurance Company, Parsian, Dey, Pasargad, Kowsar and Taavon, which have had efficient performance in the last three years, were excluded from the calculations and other companies were selected for M&A . After ensuring that no monopoly is considered via Herfindahl- Hirschman Index, M&A is performed and then the overall efficiency was measured and it was divided into three parts: technical, harmony and scale. The results showed that the two consolidations Dana-Mihan and Dana-Sina had the best efficiency and the three consolidations Alborz-Mellat, Sina-Arman and Sina-Sarmad had the lowest efficiency and potential for the highest improvement. Calculations also showed that if the scale effect in the composition is greater than 1, then the coordination effect is smaller than 1 and the inverse relationship are not necessarily satisfied.

Asset allocation has always been a challenging issue / for individuals and businesses to survive in our competitive world. One of the famous businesses, which has an enormous impact on people's lives worldwide, is the pension industry. Pension funds- as Defined Benefit, Defined Contribution, or others- accept reserves from contributors and try to invest them in a way to keep up with their obligations in the future or even pay more than that. The equity market has been one of the good choices for investment as pension funds try to reach a particular rate of return to maximize their wealth while considering not crossing red lines in taking risks. This paper will detail the new mathematical model for finding optimal stock portfolios using Generalized Co-Lower Partial Moment as a risk measure to minimize portfolio optimization. On the other hand, it introduces new tailored Expected Utility as a performance metric to maximize in this model. The proposed model's issue against previous studies is considering risk aversion and target rate of investment return as two significant investor characteristics. This is based on price returns' simulation of candidate stocks in TSE while using accurate and nonparametric Probability Density Function in historical data analysis.