Susanne Warning

What and How Long Does It Take to Get Tenure? The Case of Economics and Business Administration in Austria, Germany and Switzerland

Abstract We draw on a new and comprehensive dataset that collects the research output of business economists employed by Austrian, German and Swiss universities. We compute research rankings of departments and identify the leading departments in selected subdisciplines. Moreover, we investigate how institutional design and individual characteristics affect research productivity and draw some conclusions for the training of junior scientists.

Der relative Vorteil deutscher wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Fachbereiche im Wettbewerb um studentischen Zuspruch: Qualität des Studiengangs oder des Studienortes?

SummaryThe media, as well as economic and political advisors emphasize the disciplinary virtue of introducing „quality competition“ among German universities. Competing for prospective students should set incentives in designing innovative study programs. However, all available quality indicators for such programs — whether taken from management journal rankings, or measuring scientific productivity — currently prove to be statistically insignificant when investigating the choices of prospective students of managerial economics in Germany. The students only appear to respond to locational characteristics associated with the university sites.

How to pick your staff? Using data envelopment analysis

Purpose – This purpose of this paper is to present a tool for facilitating personnel selection when multiple heterogeneous human resource managers use multiple criteria. Two problems result from such a situation. First, when multiple criteria are applied, it is unusual for one candidate to dominate the other candidates in all areas, which requires assigning weights to the different criteria to be able to rank the candidates. Second, in a heterogeneous selection committee, finding weights that accurately reflect the individual preferences of all members is difficult. Design/methodology/approach – To deal with the multidimensional setting of selecting personnel, this paper introduces data envelopment analysis with assurance region (DEA-AR) to determine individually optimal weights for each applicant. Findings – DEA-AR leads to a score for each applicant that can serve as a signal for productivity and, thus, for evaluating the candidate. Based on linear programming, DEA-AR not only aggregates multiple dimens...

The Impact of Regional Endowment and University Characteristics on University Efficiency

We examine differences in the efficiency of UK universities in providing research and teaching. It appears that (i) universities are more efficient in providing teaching than research, (ii) the variation of efficiency is larger in research than in teaching, and (iii) the degree of (in)efficiency is affected by student characteristics like gender, age and their regional provenance and background but also past political regulation.This study examines the impact of both university characteristics and regional endowment factors on the efficiency of universities at providing teaching and research. Evidence from 94 universities located in different areas of the UK provides compelling evidence that factors beyond the control of the university management shape technical efficiency. In particular, we analyze whether regional endowment can disadvantage universities and thus reduce their efficiency in producing their outputs. Our overall results show that (i) universities are more efficient providers of teaching than research; (ii) the variation in efficiency is larger for research than for teaching, and (iii) student ability negatively correlates with the degree of inefficiency. Finally, we find compelling evidence that regional endowment significantly matters for teaching and research efficiency. While (iv) university characteristics significantly matter for research efficiency, (v) environmental factors or regional endowment strongly influence teaching, research, and overall efficiency.

Misleading Rankings of Research in Business: A Reply

Sönke Albers (2009) states in his abstract that he wants to critically evaluate our ranking of journals for economics and business; yet, that is not what he does. First and foremost, we do not develop a single ranking; instead, on the basis of four existing rankings, we construct four different meta-rankings through a methodologically sound imputation procedure, which is described in great detail in Schulze et al. (2008a, pp. 293–300). This imputation extends each base ranking to more than 2,800 journals while preserving the underlying logic of the list. It thus allows evaluating publications in journals that the original base ranking does not cover – and thus minimizes a problem that all journal lists had: they were too short! Frequently, research output could not be evaluated appropriately because a number of research outlets were not rated. Instead of imposing one list as the relevant one, we offer four different meta rankings based on two very different approaches – impact assessment and expert opinion approach – and we are very explicit about the relative advantages of both approaches, rather than criticizing just one. The user should choose the rankings knowing their relative strengths and weaknesses. Because we do not create new rankings, but impute on the basis of existing rankings, each of our imputed rankings will have the flaws and strengths of the underlying base ranking and the rankings used for imputation. Albers now claims that one of the existing rankings, i.e. the Ritzberger list and the imputed list based on Ritzberger, lacks ‘face validity’. His criterion is essentially that any list should coincide very highly with the lists that he thinks are relevant (see his Table 4). He does not make any attempt to reflect critically on the weaknesses of these lists, and thus while he is very critical towards one list he is very uncritical towards others. In the light of different weaknesses of all rankings a balanced view would take the relative strengths and weaknesses into account rather than just postulating a group of lists as