An Examination of Very Low Efficiency Scores in Data Envelopment Analysis in the Pension Funds Industry

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a powerful analytical tool that is considered as one of the most useful techniques to measure the efficiency of Decision Making Units (DMUs) in certain industry segments. However, there is a scarcity of reported use to assess pension funds’ performance due to the complexities of such funds. The few papers that can be found in literature do not consider the main characteristics of pension funds such as uncontrollable variables for managers, regulations, and funds’ status (fully funded/underfunded pension plans). Regulations affect such investment vehicles in many ways from investment strategy, tax status, reporting requirements and others. Also, as the by-product of our past research in this field the authors ran into some unexpected outcomes where some funds had achieved an extremely low efficiency score. This is very highly unusual and invited additional research. There are very few papers in the literature on extremely low efficiency scores, and there is a paucity of cogent explanations on why this is the case. Therefore, while evaluating the pension funds’ performance through DEA we worked on this problem in some detail to uncover the reason(s) for such low minimum efficiency scores for pension funds. We found that the presence of very low efficiency scores phenomena is not uncommon in pension funds industry but is in other industry studies.