Measuring efficiency in education: an analysis of different approaches for incorporating non-discretionary inputs

Measuring efficiency in the education sector is a highly complex task. One of the reasons is that the main resource of schools (the type of students they have) lie outside of their control, which means that it must be treated differently to other factors in analysis. This study examines the different options available in the literature for incorporating non-controllable inputs in a data envelopment analysis in order to determine the most appropriate model for evaluating schools. Our empirical study presents the results obtained using the model proposed by Fried et al. (1999), though we use bootstrap techniques to avoid problems of bias in the estimations.