Technological, healthcare and consumer funds efficiency: influence of COVID-19

This paper aims to analyze the efficiency of the funds in technological, healthcare, and consumer cyclical sectors based on the U.S. News & World Report rankings. We employed a Principal Component Analysis to select the indicators to explain efficiency. Then, we have used an alternative approach that combines Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding, the Value-Based DEA, to assess the efficiency of funds for 1 year (2020), 3 years (2018–2020), and 5 years (2016–2020). The results highlight that in 2020 the number of efficient funds is much smaller than in previous periods and this can be justified by the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The sectors with the most efficient funds are technology and healthcare. The factors that determine the efficiency of funds in the health sector and the technology sector are quite different, although they have not undergone major changes in the three periods considered. For managers, health funds are seen as low risk and hardly consider the return factors in all analyzed periods, which is often considered as benchmarks for inefficient funds. In the technology sector, Beta and Alpha are generally the indicators with the greatest weight in fund efficiency, showing that these funds beat the market in terms of returns and are less risky than the benchmark. This study seeks to complete the scarce existing literature on the subject, namely in the sectors under analysis, seeking to identify the indicators that fund managers ponder most to consider a fund as efficient. As far as we know, the joint efficiency analysis of these sectors and the impact they suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic are new in the literature.