The duration of the PhD at Spain from a stochastic frontier perspective: Is it really a trick-or-treat issue?

Marta Martínez-Matute ()

Chapter 29 in Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación, 2014, vol. 9, pp 545-565 from Asociación de Economía de la Educación

Abstract: The duration of the PhD is a relevant factor which influences the career prospects of the student during the rest of his life. It is also important because there are different resources, such as public expenditure or the reputation of the research centre or university where it has been done, which depends on this question. This paper examines the effect of different characteristics of Spanish PhD students on the duration of their PhD thesis. Previous evidence has found that individual characteristics as much as public funding and the existence of a supervisor affects the duration of the studies but also the prospective career of the PhD student. We assume that the duration of the PhD depends on an efficiency issue which could be analyzed from a new methodological point of view. To that aim, this paper proposes a stochastic frontier model to measure the lost of efficiency of some students due to different factors and which could be the cause that contributes to increase their PhD duration at Spain. We estimate the frontier model for the years 2006 and 2009, which also let us to analyze if the economic crisis has affected the influence of the variables on the PhD duration.

Keywords: PhD duration; efficiency of education; stochastic frontiers; postgraduate studies. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
ISBN: 978-84-942418-8-8
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