Departmental efficiency differences within a Greek university: An application of a DEA and Tobit analysis

The allocation funds mechanisms for universities and their departments seem to be a complex procedure for state authorities. Consequently, the question of how efficient universities and their departments are has been imposed by governments and policymakers. In this paper, we assess research performance of academic departments within a single Greek university. A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) application with six model variants was used to estimate technical efficiencies relative to best practice performance. Furthermore, our input–output criteria are determined and used to measure the departments' academic performance. To deliver reasonable results a Tobit model is considered in a second stage to examine the degree to which ‘environmental effects’ impact on departmental efficiencies. We find that ‘environmental effects’ such as departmental infrastructure, age and schools' personnel have an important role.