We estimate the efficiency of groundwater use in cotton production in the Punjab province of Pakistan. We use a survey data of 189 cotton producers comprising 98 tube-well owners and 91 water buyers in order to get the differential impact of tube-well ownership on groundwater use efficiency. We...

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the...

In the corn ethanol industry, the ability of plants to obtain favorable prices through marketing decisions is considered important for their overall economic performance. Based on a panel of surveyed of ethanol plants we extend data envelopment analysis (DEA) to decompose the economic efficiency...

There is a burgeoning literature using non-parametric frontier methods to measure mutual fund performance. These articles measure the relationship between the various characteristics (mainly return information and some costs of ownership) of these specialized financial products to establish a...

Students' evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities. However, in their current format SET-scores are controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) questionnaire items are relegated to the status of being of equal importance, and (2) the feedback to the...

Although benevolent (BoD) weighting has some appealing features for the construction of evaluation scores of teacher performance (i.e., SET-scores), it still suffers from an important drawback in its basic form: the sensitivity of its outcomes to the influence of potential outliers, extreme...

This paper presents a methodology to aggregate multidimensional research output. Using a tailored version of the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis model, we account for the large heterogeneity in research output and the individual researcher preferences by endogenously weighting the...

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 advocated a conditional version of the ‘benefit-of-the-doubt’ approach to estimate the relationship between the...

The non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach is increasingly used to construct composite indicators for country performance monitoring, benchmarking, and policy evaluation in a large variety of fields. The flexibility in the definition of aggregation weights is praised as the method's...

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...