Suchergebnisse

In this study we employ a distance function approach to investigate sources of productivity growth in UK building societies in the post‐deregulation period 1989–93. Productivity growth is decomposed into technical change and change in efficiency, with the latter change also being decomposed into change in pure technical efficiency, change in scale efficiency and change in input congestion. As a scale‐inefficient society may be able to obtain size efficiency gains even when the attainment of scale efficiency is impractical, we also measure the change in size efficiency over the period. The finding of substantial productivity growth was largely due to progressive shifts in technology, with the relatively small improvements in efficiency being largely due to improvements in scale efficiency. A marked increase in the attainment of size efficiency over the period was also found.

The neglected issue of using profit efficiency for the best-practice benchmarking of UK universities is explored to see whether this supports the policy stance of encouraging more specialised university production. The paper also investigates whether nonparametric modelling with financial ratios, in contrast to nonparametric modelling based on the prices and quantities of each university's inputs and outputs, can yield ready insights into this profit efficiency issue. The empirical results, using two new approaches, confirm that more specialised university production yields relatively higher performance on average than less specialised production. The results also highlight certain advantages of financial ratios modelling.