Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis
Mon, 12 Oct 2015 09:41:00 BST
Professor Jill Johnes from the Business School was invited to speak at the 5th Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis which took place at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto on Monday 5 October
This one-day workshop looked at efficiency and productivity for both academics and practitioners. Papers were presented relating to diverse sectors including higher education, health, energy, mining and the prison service, and covered issues such as regulation and policy.
Professor Johnes’ paper, ‘Costs and efficiency in the English Higher Education sector,’ was an extension of a project originally undertaken for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills concerning the costs and efficiency of English universities.
The aim of the analysis is to measure the efficiency of English universities using cost functions estimated from data over the period 2003/04 to 2010/11. A particular novelty of the work relates to an estimation method (called latent class modelling) which identifies groups of universities in the data which have similar cost structures. A key finding is that, once differences (both observed and unobserved) in the characteristics of institutions are accounted for, the variation in efficiency scores across institutions is greatly reduced, with a concentration of scores above 0.9 (where a score of one represents efficiency).
Jill Johnes commented: “I was delighted to be invited to speak at the 5th Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis where I was able to benefit from the comments of specialists in the field. It was also a very useful opportunity to hear about the most recent developments and applications in the efficiency and productivity field of research, and to strengthen my international networks.”
For more information please contact Jill Johnes, email: j.johnes@hud.ac.uk
