Efficiency of Italian Asset Management Companies. Working Paper presentato alla International Finance and Banking Society Conference (IFABS 2012) in Valencia

This paper investigates the level of X-eciency of Asset Management Companies (henceforth AMC), active in Italy. Eciency has been widely studied in the previous literature with reference to the banking system and investment companies; the aim of these works was to identify and compare those factors that inuence (positively) the level of eciency of such intermediaries and to oer some guides to managers and policy makers. Despite the presence of a huge amount of works, Asset Management Companies have never been studied from this point of view, probably this is due to the lack of a common model that captures the production process of these intermediaries and to the diculty of nding accounting data. We propose a model able to identify the characteristics of the production process of AMCs and we illustrate an empirical analysis based on a common technique named "stochastic frontier approach" applied to a sample of Italian AMCs. The results show that this sector is characterized by a low level of eciency in terms of costs and by limited opportunities to leverage on prots since the market seems highly competitive. The Italian market is also characterized by the presence of many big companies, but the results show that high size does not mean high level of eciency.