 Quality as a latent heterogeneity factor in the efficiency of universitiesCinzia Daraio, Leopold Simar and Paul Wilson Economic Modelling, 2021, vol. 99, issue C Abstract: In this paper we show the usefulness of recent advanced nonparametric efficiency techniques to model the performance of universities in the presence of observed and unobserved heterogeneity. Using directional distances for benchmarking purposes, we identify a latent heterogeneity factor related to the human capital of the universities and their management, that is independent from their size, and interpret the identified latent factor as a “quality” factor of the universities. After testing the significance of this latent factor, we investigate its impact on the boundary of the production set (efficient frontier) and on the distances of the units from the efficient frontier. The frontier and the efficiency distribution of our European Universities sample appear influenced by our estimated latent quality factor. We investigate these impacts from various points of view, including the trade-off between our quality factor and efficiency as well as the roles of size and specialization. Keywords: Nonparametric efficiency; Performance assessment; Benchmarking; Directional distances; Conditional efficiency; Observed and unobserved heterogeneity; Separability condition; European universities; Quality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:99:y:2021:i:c:s0264999321000687 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2021.03.004 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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