The assessment of the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) at the micro (institutional), meso (regional) and macro (country) level is an important and recurrent question in the... Show moreThe assessment of the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) at the micro (institutional), meso (regional) and macro (country) level is an important and recurrent question in the higher education’s policy debate. However, the analysis of the performance of HE systems is far from being easy to deal with. One of the main critical issues to address properly the assessment of performance, in a multi-level (systemic) perspective, is the consideration of the heterogeneity of the HEIs involved. There are different sources of heterogeneity, including the mission, the national context, the presence or absence of medical schools, the legal status and the disciplinary orientation and degree of specialization. Among the heterogeneity factors of HEIs, disciplinary specialization or subject mix is considered one of the most relevant. This paper addresses the issue of heterogeneity in its multidimensional faces by adopting two approaches. The first is integrating heterogeneous sources of available data, and the second the application of advanced econometric techniques, which allow comparing or benchmarking HEIs by capturing observed and unobserved heterogeneity. Show less
Laurens, P.; Schoen, A.; Toma, P.; Daraio, C. 2018
This paper addresses the issue of the efficiency of innovation of multinational firms applying nonparametric efficiency models which include, in a flexible multi-input multi-output Data Envelopment... Show moreThis paper addresses the issue of the efficiency of innovation of multinational firms applying nonparametric efficiency models which include, in a flexible multi-input multi-output Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framework, observed factors of heterogeneity and dynamics. Several models (a basic model, a quantitative model, a qualitative model and a mixed quantitative/qualitative model) were developed to explore the innovative activity of large multinational firms and explain the effects of R&D expenditures. They were tested using data on large and R&D intensive companies from the Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (economic and financial data, R&D investment) and a set of patent indicators characterizing the companies' inventive production built using the CIB (Corporate Invention Board) patent database. The analysis carried out on the different models of innovation has shown that partial models that consider only one aspect of the production process at a time can mask important non-linear interactions and complementarities. In fact, there may be trade-offs between quantity and quality and these can escape from one-dimensional analyses based on linear innovation models. Further investigations will include the application of a robust two stage nonparametric approach to estimate the “managerial” efficiency of the firms in order to allow the comparison between heterogeneous firms, taking out the effect of heterogeneity factors. Show less
