| By: |
Thomas Bolli (KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, Switzerland) |
| Abstract: |
This paper provides first micro-level evidence of the global university
production frontier, allowing to estimate technical efficiencies of 273 top
research universities across 29 countries between 2007 and 2009. Exploiting
comparable international data improves the estimation of the production
technology, allows to assess the distance of individual countries to the
global frontier and enables comparison of university efficiencies between and
across countries. The estimated input distance function uses undergraduate
students, graduate students and citations to capture university outputs and
staff to measure inputs. Contrasting two alternative econometric strategies to
identify technical efficiency yields relatively stable results. Furthermore,
the paper addresses the problem of unobserved heterogeneity by relating the
obtained efficiency rankings to quality rankings and by exploiting the panel
structure of the data to account for unobserved heterogeneity explicitly. The
results suggest that technical efficiency rankings can be obtained in a
relatively simple econometric setting. |
| Keywords: |
University, Global Frontier, Efficiency, Stochastic Frontier, Unobserved Heterogeneity, True Random Effects Stochastic Frontier. |
| JEL: |
D20 I20 |
| Date: |
2011–02 |
| URL: |
https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kof:wpskof:11-272 |