This paper studies the role of direct democracy in ensuring efficient and cost effective provision of goods and services in the public sector. The sample consists of the population of municipalities in the German State of Bavaria, where in the mid-1990s considerable direct democratic reforms...

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...

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...

This paper studies the role of direct democracy in ensuring efficient and cost effective provision of goods and services in the public sector. The sample consists of the population of municipalities in the German State of Bavaria, where in the mid-1990s considerable direct democratic reforms...

This paper studies the role of direct democracy in ensuring efficient and cost effective provision of goods and services in the public sector. The sample consists of the population of municipalities in the German State of Bavaria, where in the mid-1990s considerable direct democratic reforms...

We propose a non-parametric methodology to study the presence of economies of scope between teaching and research (i.e., the teaching–research nexus). In particular, the paper advocates a conditional version of the ‘benefit-of-the-doubt’ approach to estimate the relationship between...

This paper studies the influence of educational innovations on school performance. We apply a tailored, fully nonparametric conditional efficiency model to study secondary school efficiency in the Netherlands. The application uses official school data and a self-collected questionnaire on recent...