Efficiency assessment of primary care providers: A conditional nonparametric approach

This paper uses a fully nonparametric approach to estimate efficiency measures for primary care units incorporating the effect of (exogenous) environmental factors. This methodology allows us to account for different types of variables (continuous and discrete) describing the main characteristics of patients served by those providers. In addition, we use an extension of this nonparametric approach to deal with the presence of undesirable outputs in data, represented by the rates of hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive condition (ACSC) and of hospital readmissions. The empirical results show that all the exogenous variables considered have a significant and negative effect on efficiency estimate

Measuring efficiency in education: an analysis of different approaches for incorporating non-discretionary inputs

International audienceMeasuring efficiency in the education sector is a highly complex task. One of the reasons is that the main resource of schools (the type of students they have) lie outside of their control, which means that it must be treated differently to other factors in analysis. This study examines the different options available in the literature for incorporating non-controllable inputs in a DEA analysis in order to determine the most appropriate model for evaluating schools. Our empirical study presents the results obtained using the model proposed by Fried et. al (1999), though we use bootstrap techniques to avoid problems of bias in the estimations

Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación 5

Previous studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between environmental education and pro-environmental behaviors and attitudes. The aim of this study is to describe an empirical approach to measuring aspects of environmental science literacy through using data from OECD PISA 2006 in Spain. Four that purpose, we use multilevel model is to analyze in detail the impact of school activities and other additional sources on the environmental education of 15-years-old students. Our findings show that schools have a secondary role in the provision of environmental knowledge, since only few activities have a significant influence on students’ environmental performance, while media seem to have a major role in providing that information.secondary school, PISA, environmental knowledge, technical efficiency

Measuring efficiency in education: an analysis of different approaches for incorporating non-discretionary inputs

Measuring efficiency in the education sector is a highly complex task. One of the reasons is that the main resource of schools (the type of students they have) lie outside of their control, which means that it must be treated differently to other factors in analysis. This study examines the different options available in the literature for incorporating non-controllable inputs in a data envelopment analysis in order to determine the most appropriate model for evaluating schools. Our empirical study presents the results obtained using the model proposed by Fried et al. (1999), though we use bootstrap techniques to avoid problems of bias in the estimations.