Efficiency in education: a review of literature and a way forward

Abstract

La sèrie Documents de treball d'economia de l'empresa presenta els avanços i resultats d'investigacions en curs que han estat presentades i discutides en aquest departament; això no obstant, les opinions són responsabilitat dels autors. El document no pot ser reproduït total ni parcialment sense el consentiment de l'autor/a o autors/res. Dirigir els comentaris i suggerències directament a l'autor/a o autors/res, a la direcció que apareix a la pàgina següent.A Working Paper in the Documents de treball d'economia de l'empresa series is intended as a mean whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers for their comments. Nevertheless, the ideas put forwards are responsibility of the author. Accordingly a Working Paper should not be quoted nor the data referred to without the written consent of the author. Please, direct your comments and suggestions to the author, which address shows up in the next page. A p r i l 2 0 1 5 EFFICIENCY IN EDUCATION. A REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND A WAY FORWARD AbstractThis paper provides an extensive and comprehensive overview of the literature on efficiency in education. It summarizes the earlier applied inputs, outputs and contextual variables, as well as the used data sources of papers in the field of efficiency in education. Moreover, it reviews the papers on education that applied methodologies as Data Envelopment Analysis, Malmquist index, Bootstrapping, robust frontiers, metafrontier, or Stochastic Frontier Analysis. Based on the insights of the literature review, a second part of the paper provides some ways forward. It attempts to establish a link between the parametric 'economics of education' literature and the (semiparametric) 'efficiency in education literature'. We point to the similarities between matching and conditional efficiency; difference-in-differences and metafrontiers; and quantile regressions and partial frontiers. The paper concludes with some operative directions for prospective researchers in the field.

Productivity development of Norwegian institutions of higher education 2004–2013

“…Most of the performance studies of higher education focus on efficiency for units within institutions of higher education using cross-section data (see e.g. Worthington (2001), and De Witte and López-Torres (2015) for a recent comprehensive review), as remarked in Parteka and Wolszczak-Derlacz (2013). Productivity change at the level of institutions of higher education will be the theme of the present study.…”

Super-efficiency of education institutions: an application to economics departments

“…More recent studies include McMillan and Chan (2006), Johnes (2006a), Johnes (2006b), Agasisti and Johnes (2009) and Sellers-Rubio, Mas-Ruiz, and Casado-Díaz (2010). Worthington (2001), Rhaiem (2017) and Witte and López-Torres (2017) provide comprehensive surveys.…”

A note on measuring group performance over time with pseudo-panels

“…Evaluating different production alternatives is especially important, for example, in the public sector, where it often has to be decided whether public services should be funded by public or private sources. This is a typical research issue in the educational sector (for a review see De Witte and López-Torres, 2015), where previous literature focuses on comparing the performance of different groups of schools (e.g. by school ownership, by region, by country).…”