Evaluating the efficiency of Italian public universities (2008–2011) in presence of (unobserved) heterogeneity

Tommaso Agasisti (), Cristian Barra and Roberto Zotti

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2016, vol. 55, issue C, 47-58

Abstract: In assessing the performance of universities, the most recent literature underlined that the efficiency scores may suffer from the presence of incidental parameters or time-invariant, often unobservable, effects that lead to biased efficiency estimates. To deal with this problem, we apply a procedure developed by [67]; for estimating the efficiency in Italian higher education through a multi-output parametric distance function. We show that models which do not consider unobservable heterogeneity tend to estimate divergent efficiency scores. We also study the determinants of efficiency; the findings provide a clue towards the expansion of pro-competitive policies in the Italian higher education sector, consistently with the interpretation that when market forces operate, there are benefits for university efficiency. When exploring differences in the performance of universities, by geographical areas, we claim that maintaining State-level policies can be detrimental for overall efficiency, and instead special interventions for universities in the South should be designed.

Keywords: Efficiency; Unobserved heterogeneity; Higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C67 I23 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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Working Paper: Evaluating the efficiency of Italian public universities (2008-2011) in presence of (unobserved) heterogeneity (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceps:v:55:y:2016:i:c:p:47-58

DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2016.06.002

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