DEA Approaches for Financial Evaluation - A Literature Review

Financial assessment has been of great interest to both academic and practitioners in the past decades. Among several performance assessment approaches, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has become one of the crucial tools that have been commonly adopted to financially evaluate firms in various fields. The main aim of this review article is to review of DEA models in regarding to evaluation of the financial performance. This paper presents the first comprehensive and structured literature review of the use of DEA models for financially assessment. To this end, this paper reviewed and summarized the different models of DEA models that have been applied around the world to development of financial assessment problems. Consequently, a review of 455 published scholarly papers appearing in 160 journals between 1994 and 2021 have been obtained to achieve a comprehensive review of DEA application in financial efficiency. Accordingly, the selected articles have been categorized based on year of publication, authors, nationalities, scope of study, time duration, application area, study purpose, results, outcomes, etc. The discussion and the findings of this paper can be used as a guideline to analysts to determine the best fit financial assessment method when DEA evaluation is applied to any dataset. Future perspectives and challenges are discussed.