Abstract
Over the past few decades, South Korea has prioritized higher education to boost knowledge-based economic development. This study investigates Korean private universities’ scale and scope economies using several input/output variables and employs them using a stochastic frontier analysis of the input distance function. As our dataset does not comprise price-based information, the duality approach between the cost and input distance functions enables us to use our data directly to test ray- and product-specific scale and scope economies. Our dataset comprises university-level data for 57 private universities from 2011 to 2016. The findings reveal ray-scale and global-scope economies for the sampled universities. Based on these empirical results, we provide several suggestions for future research.
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Notes
The list of sample universities is provided in a previous study of private universities in Korea. See Shamohammadi and Oh (2019) for more details.
The results of the Hausman test are available upon request.
We express our gratitude to an anonymous referee for providing invaluable feedback.
Detailed results can be obtained upon request.
The list of university classifications can be found in a previous study of private universities in Korea. In that study, the authors employed efficiency pattern analysis to categorize these target universities into three distinct classes: research-oriented, research-teaching-oriented, and teaching-oriented universities. For more in-depth information, please refer to Shamohammadi and Oh (2019).
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Shamohammadi, M. Determining scale and scope economies in Korean private universities: an input distance function approach. Scientometrics 129, 2583–2613 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04967-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04967-8