Methodologies to evaluate public defined benefit pension fund health

Effective investment and management of public sector defined benefit pension (DBP) funds help to secure the public employees' benefits payments and realize sustainable development of public DBPs. By collecting the public DBP fund-level data from multiple sources, this dissertation provides methodologies of examining specific evaluation and reporting issues that are of importance to public DBP fund health: (1) public DBP performance, (2) public DBP governance quality, and (3) public DBP financial reporting quality.;This dissertation firstly evaluates public DBPs' relative performance with data envelopment analysis (DEA) method, which has taken the expense factor and contribution factor into evaluation process. DEA efficiency scores are used to evaluate public DBPs' financial efficiency as well as operational efficiency. Besides, several environmental factors has been examined with nonparametric test. The results showed that public DBPs with longer history, more active participants and lower investment expenses demonstrated better performance. Secondly, the investigation of the impacts of pension governance on public DBP performance have identified several significant relationships between pension governance factors and public defined benefit pension fund performance. Public DBPs benefit from high quality pension governance when there are more appointed trustees in the board as well as a separate investment council responsible for public DBP investment activities. Thirdly, the examination of public DBP actuarial accounting choices indicates that the choices of pension accounting assumptions are significantly affected by several determinants. Public DBPs with higher funding level, lower fiscal stress and high quality external audit are more likely to adopt conservative accounting assumptions.;To sum, this dissertation has enriched current studies in public DBP domain, including the public DBP performance evaluation, the impacts of pension governance and the determinants of actuarial accounting assumptions. It also contributes to the literature of corporate governance and accounting information quality, especially in aspects of pension board composition, financial expertise and the influencing factors of accounting choices. Besides, this dissertation provides implications to policy makers. This would be of great importance to future pension reforms in areas of board composition, governance organization design, board expertise training and public DBP financial reporting standards.