1,721,575 research outputs found
Schools' efficiency and equity: evidence from a stochastic frontier approach with translog specification
No full textDepartment of Economics Discussion Paper
Full text linkInternationalisation is a major trend in higher education worldwide. Yet, little evidence is given on the net impact of international students on national economies. This study addresses this gap by estimating the benefits against the costs driven by international students in Belgium and its Flemish region in particular. Using a unique combination of various sources of micro-data, the results show net positive benefits that exceed costs by a factor ranging between 2.4 (lower bound) to 3.1 (upper bound) times. The results vary highly with the level of education, as the ratio is the lowest for doctoral students (1.2-1.6) and highest for master students (5.1-6.3). The effect is mainly driven by a high stay rate of international students, who are likely to work in the country after graduation. When considering indirect effects, our results show that there are no significant peer effects due to the presence of international students in the classroom.status: Publishe
The effect of additional resources for schools with disadvantaged students: Evidence from a conditional efficiency model
No full textThis paper proposes an innovative approach to evaluate the causal impact of a policy change on efficiency. It combines insights from the econometric impact evaluation techniques and from the standard efficiency analysis. Specifically, we account for endogeneity issues by introducing a quasi-experimental setting within a conditional multi-input multi-output efficiency framework and decompose the overall efficiency between ‘group-specific’ efficiency (i.e., reflecting internal managerial inefficiency) and ‘program’ efficiency (i.e., explaining the impact of the policy intervention on
performance). This allows us to interpret the efficiency differences in a causal way. We demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodology through an application to secondary and primary schools in Flanders, Belgium. In particular, exploiting exogenous thresholds, we examine whether additional resources for disadvantaged students impact the efficiency of schools. Our empirical results indicate that additional resources do not causally influence efficiency around the threshold
On distinguishing the direct causal effect of an intervention from its efficiency-enhancing effects
Full text linkThis paper proposes an innovative methodology for handling endogeneity issues in the evaluation of policy performance. By estimating a regression discontinuity design with a four-component stochastic frontier panel data model, we estimate the causal impact of a policy intervention on the outcome variable, whenever the treatment status depends on an exogenous threshold. We distinguish between (i) the direct effect of the intervention, (ii) the efficiency-enhancing effect, or (iii) their combination. Moreover, we distinguish between persistent (time-invariant) and transient (time-varying) inefficiency components while accounting for unobserved heterogeneity, which is important for policy implications. We showcase the practical usefulness of the proposed approach by estimating the effect of providing additional resources on schools that exceed an exogenously set share of disadvantaged students in secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. We also demonstrate the trade-off between balance of the covariates in the treated and control group and statistical power. Thus, despite insignificant effects in a balanced but smaller sample close to the discontinuity, the results become significant in the unbalanced sample with more statistical power. In both samples, we observe that the policy had an effect on the outcome mostly through the efficiency-enhancing channel. To this extent, we show that the model specification including both direct and indirect effects outperforms the other two specifications and it offers a more exhaustive perspective from a policy view point
Sustainable budgeting and financial balance: Which lever will you pull?
No full textDuring the past few decades, countries have experienced a remarkable increase in local expenditure levels to address rising local needs. However, the limited availability of financial resources, exacerbated first by the 2008 financial crisis and then by Covid19 crisis, has called for budget restrictions usually imposed by higher levels of government. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a balance budget rule enforcement, exploring its effect on the local government cost efficiency and, in particular, considering the complex trade-off between efficiency and equity. Specifically, our identification strategy considers the exogenous introduction of a new budget balance rule that requires local governments to respect both an annual and a longer-term equilibrium criterion. The difference-in-differences analysis builds on a rich panel dataset covering all the public functions. We find that, on average, the budget rule enforcement exerted a positive effect on local government efficiency
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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