With or without CU

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of efficiency of corporate universities. An efficiency is defined in relative terms: as having relatively better performance in comparison to other companies. Different indicators of performance were employed in order to analyze short-term and long-term efficiency. A comparative analysis of European companies and emerging Russian companies is performed in order to understand if there are country differences in the efficiency of corporate universities. Design/methodology/approach: To avoid potential omitted variable bias, fixed effect within estimator is employed. This estimator enables controlling for a firm-specific time-constant effect which conditions company’s performance and is responsible for other individual traits. The rest of the characteristics are controlled with a proxy, which are traditional for corporate finance studies. Findings: There are contradictory results for the efficiency of a corporate university; for the European companies, a corporate university brings positive effect for the short-term performance, nevertheless, as the authors have found that it destructs value in long term. A company with a corporate university has 70 percent less market value added than an average company. There is a negative short-term synergy while the long-term synergy is positive. The results for the Russian sample are very consistent: corporate universities have negative or neutral effect on the performance. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature about strategic management and human resources management. It addresses the issue on efficiency of corporate universities in companies considering this as one of the key strategic investment in human resource policy. It appears that the corporate university is not a panacea for all companies to develop their human development policy.