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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF HOUSING AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT,Vol.32,Issue2,P.313-337

语言

英文

关键字

Social housing; Housing corporations; Efficiency; Mergers; Data envelopment analysis; Stochastic frontier analysis; DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS; MALMQUIST INDEXES; NETHERLANDS; BEHAVIOR; MODELS

作者单位

[Veenstra, Jacob; Allers, Maarten A.] Univ Groningen, Fac Econ & Business, Ctr Res Local Govt Econ, POB 800, NL-9700 Groningen, Netherlands. [Koolma, Hendrik M.] Vrije Univ Amsterdam, Fac Social Sci, De Boelelaan 1105, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands. Veenstra, J (reprint author), Univ Groningen, Fac Econ & Business, Ctr Res Local Govt Econ, POB 800, NL-9700 Groningen, Netherlands. E-Mail: jacob.veenstra@rug.nl

摘要

The efficiency of social housing providers is a contentious issue. In the Netherlands, there is a widespread belief that housing corporations have substantial potential for efficiency improvements. A related question is whether scale influences efficiency, since recent decades have shown a trend of mergers among corporations. This paper offers a framework to assess the effects of scale and mergers on the efficiency of Dutch housing corporations by using both a data envelopment analysis and a stochastic frontier analysis, using panel data for 2001-2012. The results indicate that most housing corporations operate under diseconomies of scale, implying that merging would be undesirable in most cases. However, merging may have beneficial effects on pure technical efficiency as it forces organizations to reconsider existing practices. A data envelopment analysis indeed confirms this hypothesis, but these results cannot be replicated by a stochastic frontier analysis, meaning that the evidence for this effect is not robust.