IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kof/wpskof/11-272.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Global Production Frontier of Universities

Author

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Bolli, 2011. "The Global Production Frontier of Universities," KOF Working papers 11-272, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:11-272
    DOI: 10.3929/ethz-a-006341664
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-006341664
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.3929/ethz-a-006341664?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Which are the most efficient universities?
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2011-03-29 19:43:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zara Daghbashyan & Enrico Deiaco & Maureen McKelvey, 2014. "How and why does cost efficiency of universities differ across European countries? An explorative attempt using new microdata," Chapters, in: Andrea Bonaccorsi (ed.), Knowledge, Diversity and Performance in European Higher Education, chapter 9, pages iii-iii, Edward Elgar Publishing.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    University; Global Frontier; Efficiency; Stochastic Frontier; Unobserved Heterogeneity; True Random Effects Stochastic Frontier;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Lists

    This item is featured on the following reading lists, Wikipedia, or ReplicationWiki pages:
    1. Economic Logic blog

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:11-272. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/koethch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.