What is the impact of scale and specialization on the research efficiency of european universities?

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of size and specialization on the research efficiency of European universities. The proposed approach builds on the notion that university production is a multi-input multi-output process different than standard production activity (Bonaccorsi and Daraio, 2004). We apply a conditional efficiency analysis approach (Badin, Daraio and Simar, 2012a,b; Daraio and Simar, 2007) in a directional distance framework to evaluate the impact of size and specialization on the research efficiency of 401 European universities, from 19 European countries. Data refer mainly to the year 2008 and include universities that in 2005-2009 have published at least 100 publications in Scopus database. In particular we assess the impact of scale and specialization distinguishing their role on the efficient frontier and on the distribution of inefficiencies. Size seems to have a negative impact on most efficient units and on units that are lagging behind. On the contrary, specialization seems to have a slightly positive impact on the best performers and on catching-up universities. © AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH Vienna 2013.