Abstract:
This paper investigates the efficiency of 188 economics departments around the world using data from RePEc. We go beyond the heavily used data envelopment analysis and utilize partial frontier analysis – specifically order-α and order-m – which addresses some of the drawbacks of the standard efficiency frontier analysis and allows for so-called super-efficient departments. We examine the particularities of these approaches and find that the super-efficient departments are not only the ‘usual suspects’. Furthermore, standard output rankings are not well correlated with our estimated efficiency rankings, which themselves are rather similar.