Efficiency in higher education teaching activities: a stochastic frontier analysis

GUSTAVO FERRO; VANESA D'ELIA

La Plata

Congreso; LIII Reunión Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Economía Política; 2018

UNLP

We aim to study technical efficiency of undergraduate teaching activity in national universities in Argentina. We surveyed the literature seeking the theoretical and applied consensus, and we estimate a production frontier for the sector. We employ a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with a panel of 37 national universities over a 9 year period. We compare conventional models that do not take into account heterogeneity with heterogeneityextended stochastic frontier models.We find 20% to 25% of inefficiency on average in terms of lost outcomes (graduates).Besides, as expected, those models that take into account unobserved heterogeneity present higher values of technical efficiency while the random effect model presents the lowest value. This result indicates that there is evidence of heterogeneity that overestimates inefficiency. Our results are robust to different model specifications.We do not address extension activities of the universities, which are usually difficult to measure but use resources of the system. The results could be useful to devise some remedial measures to improve efficiency. To our knowledge is the first study using this method to analyze universities? efficiency in Argentina