Data envelopment analysis models of investment funds

This paper develops theory missing in the sizable literature that uses data envelopment analysis to construct return-risk ratios for investment funds. It explores the production possibility set of the investment funds to identify an appropriate form of returns to scale. It discusses what risk and return measures can justifiably be combined and how to deal with negative risks, and identifies suitable sets of measures. It identifies the problems of failing to deal with diversification and develops an iterative approximation procedure to deal with it. It identifies relationships between diversification, coherent measures of risk and stochastic dominance. It shows how the iterative procedure makes a practical difference using monthly returns of 30 hedge funds over the same time period. It discusses possible shortcomings of the procedure and offers directions for future research. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Resampling DEA estimates of investment fund performance

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is attractive for comparing investment funds because it handles different characteristics of fund distribution and gives a way to rank funds. There is substantial literature applying DEA to funds, based on the time series of funds' returns. This article looks at the issue of uncertainty in the resulting DEA efficiency estimates, investigating consistency and bias. It uses the bootstrap to develop stochastic DEA models for funds, derive confidence intervals and develop techniques to compare and rank funds and represent the ranking. It investigates how to deal with autocorrelation in the time series and considers models that deal with correlation in the funds' returns. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Using stochastic frontier analysis instead of data envelopment analysis in modelling investment performance

We introduce methods to apply stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to financial assets as an alternative to data envelopment analysis, because SFA allows us to fit a frontier with noisy data. In contrast to conventional SFA, we wish to deal with estimation risk, heteroscedasticity in noise and inefficiency terms. We investigate measurement error in the risk and return measures using a simulation-extrapolation method and develop residual plots to test model fit. We find that shrinkage estimators for estimation risk makes a striking difference to model fit, dealing with measurement error only improves confidence in the model, and the residual plots are vital for establishing model fit. The methods are important because they allow us to fit a frontier under the assumption that the risks and returns are not known exactly.</p