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A basic knowledge of quantitative methods and statistics is desirable, but the course will refresh the participants’ prior knowledge as we go along. The course will emphasize actual applications in research and consultancy, and will l train the use of opens source softwares like R. Participants are expected to bring their own notebooks to benefit fully from the hands-on activities.

The aim of this course is to introduce the participants to the theory and practice of performance evaluations and their usages in research, policy analyses, incentive schemes and regulation.

Background: Productivity and efficiency analysis is a rapidly growing, interdisciplinary field of research in economics, management sciences, and statistics. In addition to the empirical research on the magnitude, direction, and sources of productivity growth, this literature has produced quantitative methods such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), which have diffused beyond their traditional confinement to production settings. These tools are used in many different application areas including environment, development studies, education, finance, health care studies, natural resource management, public economics, and sports studies, among other fields. The tools and approaches of productivity analysis are equally well suited for micro-level analyses of firms and other decision-making units as well as macro-level cross-country comparisons. Integration with incentive theory, mechanism design and decision support systems makes the tools relevant also in normative applications

The course (5 ETCS) stretches over five days. Each day will consist of lecturing in the morning and part of the afternoon followed by conceptual discussions, presentation of applications, and hands-on exercises in the afternoon.

Teaching Plan (Tentative)

Lunch will be served around 12'oclock and in the morning and afternoon, coffee ect will be available during the lectures.

Specifically, the objectives are

1. To provide a basic understanding of state-of-the-art benchmarking, efficiency and productivity analyses methods using Data Envelopment Analyses (DEA), Stochastic Frontier Analyses (SFA) and related methods.
2. To provide training in the actual usage of such methods and associated software on different applications
3. To discuss the usage of performance evaluations to evaluate economic systems and to design decision support, reallocation mechanisms and incentive systems.

The course will draw of original literature (articles) supplemented by text-book treatments:

BoOt11: Bogetoft and Otto, Benchmarking with DEA, SFA and R, New York, pp. 1-351, 2011

Bo12: Bogetoft, Performance Benchmarking: Measuring and Managing Performance, Springer, New York, pp. 1-255, 2012.

R-package "Benchmarking", newest version

IB-manual, Interactive Benchmarking, newest version

Applications

Will be slected based on students interests. Typically regulation, eduction, health, industry

4-5 original articles

Additional topics, including

BoHo03: Bogetoft and Hougaard, Rational Inefficiency, Journal of Productivity Analysis, 20, pp. 243-271, 2003.

BoKe20: Rational Slack, WP

NoNi08: Bogetoft and Nielsen, DEA Based Auctions, European Journal of Operational Research, 184, 685-700, 2008

BoWi20: Bogetoft and Wittrup, Benefit-of-the-doubt approach, WP