Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, library services, education, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage ‘production’ process. The first stage translates basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) into service potential (e.g., opening hours), while the second stage...

Knowledge on the scale economies drives the incentives of regulators, governments and individual utilities to scale-up or scale-down the scale of operations. This paper considers the returns to scale (RTS) in non-convex frontier models. In particular, we evaluate RTS assumptions in a Free...

This paper analyzes the conduct of publicly owned monopolistic utilities regulated by a voluntary sunshine regulatory model (i.e. publication of the performances of utilities). In particular, we examine the behaviour of Dutch drinking water utilities before and after the introduction of the...

We present a novel framework for analyzing cost minimizing production behavior in multi-output settings. Our specific focus is on dealing with joint inputs, i.e. inputs that are simultaneously used for the production of multiple outputs. Here, we distinguish between two possible approaches. The...

Direct and indirect standardization procedures aim at comparing differences in health or differences in health care expenditures between subgroups of the population after controlling for observable morbidity differences. There is a close analogy between this problem and the issue of risk...

Environmental factors add complexity to the comparison between specific activities or entire entities. Decision making units with an inferior performance are tempted to invoke that their organization is different from the others in the data set. By reinterpreting and extending the metafrontier...

This paper proposes a fully nonparametric framework to estimate relative efficiency of entities while accounting for a mixed set of continuous and discrete (both ordered and unordered) exogenous variables. Using robust partial frontier techniques, the probabilistic and conditional...

We present a nonparametric approach for the equity and efficiency evaluation of (private and public) primary schools in Flanders. First, we use a nonparametric (Data Envelopment Analysis) model that is specially tailored to assess educational efficiency at the pupil level. The model accounts for...

Students’ evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities and colleges for teaching improvement and decision making (e.g., promotion or tenure). However, SETs are highly controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) teachers value various aspects of excellent...