A Stochastic Frontier Analysis of English and Welsh Universities

Abstract With imperfect markets for the services of the higher education sector, it is important to assess the effectiveness of institutions. Previous studies have analysed the costs of universities but few their efficiency. In this paper, we examine the costs and efficiency of English and Welsh universities as suppliers of teaching and research using the method of stochastic frontier analysis on a panel of 80 institutions over four years. We also investigate the impact of staff and student characteristics on inefficiency.

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