Identifying how efficient public schools are - that is, the academic performance they can generate with the available inputs - is relevant information for designing public policies to improve education quality. Using a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist index, this study...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage production process. In the first stage, basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours,...