Marijn Verschelde

An environment-adjusted evaluation of citizen satisfaction with local police effectiveness: Evidence from a conditional Data Envelopment Analysis approach

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the multidimensional nature of local policing and account for characteristics that are non-controllable for the local police departments. In this paper, we construct a measure of perceived effectiveness of community oriented police forces that accounts for both multidimensional aspects of local policing and exogenous influences. In specific, this paper suggests the use of a multivariate conditional, robust order-m version of a non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach with no inputs. We show the potentiality of the method by constructing and analyzing perceived effectiveness indicators of local police forces in Belgium. The findings suggest that perceived police effectiveness is significantly conditioned by the demographic and socioeconomic environment.

A composite index of citizen satisfaction with local police services

This paper proposes a non-parametric methodology to construct composite scores of citizen satisfaction with local police corpses. More precisely, the paper advocates a custom made version of the popular Data Envelopment Analysis approach, also referred to as the ‘Benefit-of-the-Doubt’-model. The key advantage of this approach is that it weights the citizen satisfaction rates with the multiple local police functions and tasks into the composite score in an endogenous manner, thereby allowing for different values and interpretations of ‘good local policing’ among police corpses. The methodology is illustrated with citizen satisfaction data on a sample of Belgian local police corpses.

School Staff Autonomy and Educational Performance: Within‐School‐Type Evidence

In this paper, we show the effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The value-added compared to the existing body of literature is that we employ variation in autonomy within the same country and within the same school type in order to reduce the omitted variable problem. To fully capture the informational advantage of local actors, we define autonomy as the operational empowerment of the schools direction and teachers. The Flemish secondary school system in Belgium is analysed because it displays unique within-school-type variation in school staff autonomy. This variation originates from autonomously operating school governing bodies that can group multiple schools and are free to delegate responsibilities to the school staff. This variation is likely exogenous because it is mainly driven by approximately random variation in characteristics and composition of the school boards. Combining detailed school-level and pupil-level data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 study with a semi-parametric hierarchical model, we find a strong positive effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The result is shown to be robust to problems of reverse causality and simultaneity.

An Analysis of Managerialism and Performance in English and Welsh Male Prisons

This paper fills a noticeable gap in the current economic and penology literature by proposing new performance-enhancing policies based on an efficiency analysis of a sample of male prisons in England and Wales over the period 2009/10. In addition, we advance the empirical literature by integrating the managerialism of four strategic functions of prisons, employment and accommodation, capacity utilization, quality of life in prison and the rehabilitation and re-offending of prisoners. We find that by estimating multiple models focussing on these different areas some prisons are more efficient than other establishments. In terms of policy, it is therefore necessary to consider not just an overall performance metric for individual prisons, as currently undertaken annually by the UK Ministry of Justice, but to look into the administration and managerialism of their main functions in both a business and public policy perspective. Indeed, it is further necessary to view prisons together and not as single entities, so as to obtain a best practice frontier for the different operations that management undertakes in English and Welsh prisons.

Multi-output efficiency and operational safety: An analysis of railway traffic control centre performance

Transportation service providers are under increasing pressure to raise cost efficiency without sacrificing safety. We show the usefulness of a nonparametric multi-output framework to both monitor staff efficiency and detect operational safety concerns. To realistically model input–output relations at an hourly rate of Belgian computerized railway traffic control centres, we apply a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-based framework with proportional cost allocation restrictions and introduce output-specific metafrontiers. Our analysis (covering each single hour of the complete year 2015) shows that production tasks with a highly variable work load, when characterized by binding cost allocation restrictions and high within-traffic-control-centre efficiency, are more prone to human error. Further, we show how DEA combined with disaggregated data can be used to a priori assess staff schedule changes. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)