The evaluation of university departments. A case study for Firenze

Over the last two decades, the interest to assess the quality of university teaching and research has considerably grown. This paper presents a study concerning the evaluation of the departments of the University of Firenze using Data Envelopment Analysis. It shows several applications with different variables choices to assess the performance both in teaching and in research activities. The reliability of the preferred specification was verified with a heuristic experiment, using different variables and a different number of variables. Particular attention is given to the problem of data availability and quality (e.g. for research output assessment). © 2009 International Atlantic Economic Society.