Abstract
The estimation of economies of scope between research and teaching has been the object of a large literature in economics of education and efficiency analysis, with parametric and non-parametric specifications. The paper contributes to the literature by building a pan-European dataset that integrates official statistics on higher education at country level with bibliometric indicators. The dataset allows a breakdown by scientific and educational field, accounting for the heterogeneity among disciplines. We applied a technique which has not been used for the efficiency estimation of economies of scope in higher education, namely seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) applied to separate input–output equations describing the production of education and research. We found confirmation for economies of scope in some fields and with some specifications, or no relation between the equations. In no case did we find diseconomies of scope between teaching and research.
Highlights
Universities can be considered multi-input multi-output institutions, which combine heterogeneous inputs and deliver several outputs according to their institutional mission [1,2]
Organizations operating under economies of scope are more efficient when they produce several outputs jointly than it would be by producing the same outputs with separate production units
With the aim of modeling the multiple-output process, we explored in this paper the possibility of referring to the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models firstly introduced by [63] which allowed us to account for the existence of contemporaneous correlations between teaching and research activities as well as for different sets of explanatory variables in each equation, describing the two production processes
Summary
Universities can be considered multi-input multi-output institutions, which combine heterogeneous inputs and deliver several outputs according to their institutional mission [1,2]. The outputs considered are placed under the umbrella of the Humboldtian missions of universities, namely teaching and research. The question becomes whether universities, given their inputs, can optimize jointly the outputs of teaching and research, or rather experience tensions and tradeoffs between these outputs. A large amount of literature has examined economies of scope in the framework of efficiency analysis, using multiproduct cost functions or data envelopment analysis [1,11,12]. The pioneering studies of [13,14] found economies of scope between teaching and research, while [15] confirmed this finding but only up to a certain size. Summarizing several studies for the case of UK, Papadimitriou and Johnes report that the authors “consistently find global diseconomies of scope for the typical university” [5]
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