infonet-economy

This paper uses a panel data set containing universities across eight European countries to model an output distance function and analyze the impact of three competitive funding types on the production frontier and the university effciency. We find little evidence for an effect of the budget share financed by tuition fees or private funds on the production frontier, but a significantly negative impact of international public funds. Similarly, only international public funds have an effect on effiency. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis, that competitive funding reduces the frontier due to monitoring costs, but increases competition and therefore decreases ineffciency. Our findings remain robust to the inclusion of country-specific dummies and time trends, the use of lagged values and country averages as instruments and the variation of the identification strategy for university effciency.

This paper develops a theoretical framework for the impact of competitive university funding, suggesting that the direction of the effect might differ between the production frontier and effciency. We test the models predictions using a panel data set at micro-level across eight European countries to estimate a simultaneous two-stage stochastic frontier approach. Supporting our predictions, the results show that tuition fees have a positive impact on the production frontier, but a negative one on effciency. Conversely, public international funds reduce the production frontier, but increase effciency. These findings
suggest that introducing competition in the university sector entails a trade-off that should be taken into account by politicians.

Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed higher education institutions to use their resources more efficiently. Higher education institutions increasingly now aim at differentiating themselves from their competitors in terms of the range of outputs they produce. Assuming that different market positioning strategies will have different effects on the performance of higher education institutions, this paper explores the existence of economies of scale and scope in the German higher education sector. Using an input-oriented distance function approach, we estimate the economies of scale and scope and the technical efficiency for 154 German higher education institutions from 2001 through 2007. Our results suggest that comprehensive universities should indeed orientate their activities to the concept of a full-university that combines teaching and research activities across a broad range of subjects. In contrast, praxis-oriented small and medium-sized universities of applied sciences should specialise in the teaching and research activities they conduct.

This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the European university landscape according to the following dimensions: history/foundation of university, dynamics of growth, specialization pattern, subject mix, funding composition, offer profile and productivity.

Globalisierung erhöht in Unternehmen Bedarf an Risikosteuerung und Kontrolle – Überregulierung? – Audit society versus Trust society

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of an open outside-in innovation management strategy on companies' innovativeness and innovation performance. Specifically, it focuses on the adoption of the open innovation paradigm in practice and the extent of collaboration with different stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach – The proposed hypotheses are tested empirically using survey data collected from stock-listed companies in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The data include the complete responses from 141 R&D managers for the period from 2004 to 2008.

Findings – The openness of the outside-in process in R&D management is of crucial importance for achieving high direct and indirect innovation output effects. In particular, openness towards customers, suppliers and universities has a significant positive impact on the different innovation performance measures. Regarding openness towards cross-sector companies, the analysis reveals a significant negative effect on innovation performance.

Research limitations/implications – The utilization of cross-sectional data and its dependency on the perceptions and experiences of the respondents has its limitations. Thus, future research should be based on a more longitudinal design that emphasizes quantitative measurement techniques.

Originality/value – To date, the adoption of open innovation in practice has not been examined in depth. This study provides empirical insights into the open innovation approaches in German-speaking countries and, by drawing important conclusions for managers involved in the R&D processes, fills a gap in the innovation management literature.

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.