The aim of this paper is to measure the efficiency of insurance companies in Saudi Arabia using data envelopment analysis (DEA), to analyse the effectiveness of underwriting processes primarily inputs and outputs are determined. Moreover, this study aims at comparing the efficiency of Takaful and cooperative in the year 2014. Taking into account two main approaches of this technique and considering a sample of 23 insurance companies, we show that the results revealed that insurance companies do not operate efficiently. Also, a classification of companies allows to discover that on average, Takaful insurance are relatively more efficient than cooperative insurance companies. The main finding of this paper is the need for better resource allocation in the cooperative insurance companies’ systems, because some Takaful insurance companies have resource surplus and in other cooperative ones it is observed a lack of resources.

This study displays the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure on financial stability (FS) of Saudi Takaful insures during the COVID-19 pandemic by assessing how does board gender diversity (BGD) mediate this effect. This study builds on unbalanced panel of 130 firm-year observations from 26 Saudi Takaful insurers over the period 2020–2024. The dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) is used to check the interdependence relationship between insurers' CSR disclosure and FS with BGD as a moderator. Results indicate that CSR disclosure improves the FS of Saudi Takaful insurers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the moderation analysis indicates the limited influence of BGD on the CSR disclosure -FS nexus. These results remain robust through rigorous robustness checks.