Course Coordinator: Professor Peter Bogetoft, Department of Economics (ECON)

Faculty

Professor Peter Bogetoft
Department of Economics, CBS

Prerequisites

A basic knowledge of quantitative methods and statistics is required, 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.

Aim of the course

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.

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.

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, natural resource management, public economics, and sports 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 and longitudinal  comparisons. Integration with incentive theory, mechanism design and decision support systems makes the tools relevant also in normative applications

Preliminary lecture plan

Teaching style

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.

In addition, there will be 4 two-hours zoom events before July, where we can discuss difficult topics, take up new methods, and where participants can present work-in-progress on efficiency and productivity projects. 

Lecture plan

A preliminary plan is provided above. The exact applications will be decided based in part on the interests of the participants.

Assessment

A course certificate for the course is granted based on attendance and active participation.

Course literature

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

• Bogetoft, P. and L. Otto, Benchmarking with DEA, SFA, and R, Springer New York, 2011
• Bogetoft, P, Performance Benchmarking: Measuring and Managing Performance, Springer New York 2012