Since the 1990ies the higher education system in the German speaking area has been faced an essential paradigm change: The model of governmental steering and control was replaced by the model of governmental supervision following the concept of New Public Management. It was assumed that an enlargement of autonomy would increase the effciency of the whole tertiary system. At the same time, the restructuring
of the European higher education system has been started in
1999 by implementing the Bologna reforms. To investigate how the Swiss universities have digested the national and international reforms we apply an input distance function and estimate the technical effciency of a panel data set containing all of the 12 Swiss universities for the period of 1999-2008 both at university level and discipline level.
We find essential effciency variations across the disciplines caused by structural differences regarding the endowment with ressources and output targets which indicate the need to analyse effciency at a disaggregated level. Furthermore, our results show that there are external determinants that affect the effciency of Swiss universities.
Se fondant sur une «analyse d'enveloppement des données» («Data Envelopment Analysis», DEA), le présent article étudie la manière dont a évolué l'efficience des différentes universités suisses de 1999 à 2007 et identifie celles dont la performance a été inférieure aux autres. La plupart des établissements ont bien maîtrisé l'exigeant processus de réforme de la décennie écoulée, malgré quelques difficultés initiales qui ont diminué leur niveau d'efficience. Celui-ci s'est davantage creusé pour les hautes écoles qui ont dû parallèlement mener à bien des restructurations internes et qui ont eu besoin de plus de temps pour parachever leur processus d'adaptation.
The student-faculty ratio is of great significance to policy makers and media as a popular measure of education and teaching quality. Due to its simplicity and the availability of data, it is often used in higher education policy for allocating resources and for ranking universities. This is especially so in some European countries which do not have selective admission policies and where universities have to cope with huge numbers of students. However, there is no definition and no empirically validated data for an appropriate student-faculty ratio. To close this gap, we constructed a model with parameters relevant for high quality teaching and education and validated them empirically by conducting a survey among university professors in business administration. The results clearly illustrate that student-faculty ratios are discipline specific and depend whether the university is research or teaching oriented.
We empirically investigate the performance effect of team-specific human capital in highly interactive teams. Based on the tenets of the resource-based view of the firm
and on the ideas of typical learning functions, we hypothesize that team members’ shared experience in working together have a positive effect on team performance, but at diminishing rates. When we hold constant a team’s stock of general human capital and other potential drivers, we find support for this prediction. We also discuss the implications concerning investment decisions into human capital as well as the transferability of our findings to other contexts.
Forderungen nach mehr Aktionärsdemokratie finden zunehmende gesellschaftliche und auch akademische Akzeptanz. Der Beitrag er- läutert, weswegen sie dennoch falsch sind, und empfiehlt eine Rück- besinnung auf die Kernelemente der Board Primacy im Falle anste- hender Aktienrechtsrevisionen.
