Accounting for economies of scope in performance evaluations of university professors

Teaching and research are widely regarded as the two key activities of academics. We propose a tailored version of the popular Data Envelopment Analysis methodology to evaluate the overall performance of university faculty. The methodology enables accounting for the potential presence of economies of scope between the teaching and research activities. It is illustrated with a dataset of professors working at a Business & Administration department of a university college. The estimation results reveal that overall the performance scores of faculty decrease if we allow for spillovers from research to teaching and vice-versa.