Nicky Rogge

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Centre for Economic Studies

This paper examines gender (in)equality in the European Union and the EU countries across six core life domains, ‘Work & Money’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Power’, ‘Health’, ‘Safety, Security & Trust’, and ‘Life Satisfaction’, for the period 2010–2018. The paper advocates a non-parametric (Benefit-of-the-Doubt) frontier estimation approach for estimating gender...

The present paper is an exploratory study of the anchoring bias among individuals with autism. Anchoring bias is one of the most robust choice heuristics. The anchoring bias is measured and compared among adults with autism and age‐, gender‐, and education level‐matched, neurotypical controls. The study differentiates between high and low anchors....

This paper quantifies and compares the EU Member States' performance evolutions from 2006 to 2018 towards their Europe 2020 target by a Window Analysis of the Benefit-of-the-Doubt method. The results show an overall positive trend for EU Member States in progressing towards the Europe 2020 strategy targets, but also a divide between different group...

Background The tendency to maximize is one of the most frequently studied personal traits in choice-making and decision-making. In spite of the large resemblances between the decision behaviour that is characteristic for maximizers and the decision behaviour displayed by individuals with autism, and the considerable overlap in the list of decision...

This paper measures and compares the World Bank regions’ opportunity sets to promote ease of doing business for the years 2010 and 2019, as well as the time period 2010–2019. We combine the theoretical framework of Verbunt et al. (2020) and the non-parametric frontier estimation approach as proposed by Van Puyenbroeck and Rogge (2020) to construct...

This paper measures and compares the sunk-cost bias among autistic adults, and neurotypical controls. Frequent influencing personality traits and task factors affecting the sunk-cost bias such as age, gender, and education level, time spent in the decision task, and the level of sunk cost (e.g., very low, low, moderate, and high), are controlled fo...

This paper measures and analyses well-being in the 349 regions in OECD countries. It is argued that the multidimensional nature of well-being and the disparate policy priorities of nations/regions calls for a reconciliatory performance evaluation framework, for which this paper advocates the use of Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) weighting. In particula...

A major difficulty for the application of Amartya Sen’s capability approach is that individual capability sets cannot readily be observed. This article proposes a non-parametric framework to construct such sets, on the basis of observed functionings of individuals that are taken to belong to a group sharing the same capability set. Within this fram...

The World Bank's Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index is well-known and widely used to quantify and monitor the ‘ease of doing business’ within a country. The index attracted notable criticism for being too reliant on a ‘one size fits all’ approach (equal weighting) to the weighting step of its construction. The present paper recomputes the EDB index...

Autism is associated with a range of costs. This paper reviews the literature on estimating the economic costs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). More or less 50 papers covering multiple countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc.) were analysed. Six types of costs are discussed in depth: (i) medical and healthcare service c...

This paper introduces a new composite indicator method integrating the spatial dependence into the robust directional model in the case of undesirable outputs. The proposed approach is advantageous compared to the traditional and conditional robust Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) models in that it allows to compare the performance of individual units wi...

This paper describes and analyzes EU Member States’ progress towards the national EU2020 targets. To do so, this paper constructs a geometric composite index with Benefit-of-the-Doubt weights as a measure of a Member State's overall performance on the EU2020 headline indicators. A tripartite decomposition of Member State performance change is prese...

This paper examines productivity growth across NUTS 2-regions in the EU during the period in which the Lisbon Strategy was rolled out (period 2000–2011). A robust nonparametric production frontier estimation technique is used to estimate and decompose regional productivity growth. Results show that in spite of the increased focus on improving compe...

This paper quantifies and analyses subjective quality of life in the EU countries as a multidimensional concept using subjective citizen satisfaction data on eight different life dimensions. The composite index is constructed using a geometric Benefit-of-the-doubt (BoD)-method. Results show a clear divide between the Nordic and Western European cou...

It is well-known that composite indicator construction relies on several intermediate modelling steps and that, as a result, one should be cautious about the exact rankings of observations on the basis of specific composite index values. One way to deal with this concern rests on comparing groups rather than individual observations, which has e.g....

This study measures and benchmarks regional social inclusion performances in Europe using a composite index constructed on the basis of the commonly agreed sub-indicators of the Europe 2020 headline indicators. The multidimensional nature of these issues and the disparate social policy priorities of nations/regions in addressing them call for a rec...

This paper measures and monitors EU Member States’ change in social inclusion using a set of statistical indicators as commonly endorsed by the Heads of State and Government in the Europe2020-program and employed by Social OMC. In particular, for each EU Member State a composite policy performance index is constructed using Van Puyenbroeck and Rogg...

Composite indicators (CIs) are usually computed as arithmetic (weighted) averages of (often normalized) sub-indicators. Several studies criticized this procedure for implying requirements and properties that are often hard to maintain in practical applications. Recent studies explored the multiplicative aggregation and more specifically the geometr...

This paper attempts to benchmark the municipal solid waste (MSW) management performance of the NUTS 2-regions in the EU by constructing a composite indicator. In order to account for commensurability, weighting and aggregation issues of the performance indicators in regional waste and materials' management, this paper advocates a conditional direct...

This paper examines (a) whether people are less accurate in judging choice time as choice tasks involve more choice options, more choice information, or a combination of both and (b) whether people with a higher tendency to look for the best option in choice making (maximizers) have less accurate duration judgments of choice time as compared to peo...

This paper builds on Van Puyenbroeck and Rogge's (2017) ‘indirect’ multiplicative Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) index number framework, in which the linear, data-driven BoD-model is used to estimate the importance of various sub-indicators within a geometric composite index (CI). We present an integrated framework that combines optimistic and pessimis...

In this short communication, I propose a procedure to aggregate individual composite indicators (CIs) into a group CI (e.g., aggregate CI for a group of countries) that is based on the work of Färe and Zelenyuk (2003) [On aggregate Farrell efficiency scores. European Journal of Operational Research 146 (3), 615-620] that was originally presented in...

This paper measures the impact of the economic crisis on the level of change in social inclusion in the EU during the period 2005–2012. A comparison of the period 2005–2008 (pre-crisis) and 2009–2012 (post-crisis) suggests that the financial and economic crisis of 2008 and the period of economic downturn and austerity that followed deteriorated soc...

The paper contributes to the debate on how to measure regions’ innovation performance. On the basis of the concept of regional innovation efficiency, we propose a new measure that eases the issue of choosing between industry-specific or global measures. We argue for the use of a robust shared-input DEA-model to compute regions’ innovation efficienc...

The increasing availability of statistical data raises opportunities for ‘big’ data and learning analytics. Here, we review the academic literature and research relating to the use of big data analytics in the public sector, and its contribution to public organizations’ performance and efficiency. We outline the advantages as well as the limitation...

Geometric mean index numbers are a multiplicative aggregation of (price or quantity) ratios with their importance exponents/weights derived from one or more observed budget shares. In the specific context of composite indicator construction, we propose to use the budget shares as naturally generated by the linear Benefit-of-the-Doubt model. This ap...

The paper applies a multilevel modeling approach in the study of individual behavior in choice experiments. The purpose is to study the relationship between choice time and several features of the choice task such as the number of choice alternatives, amount of choice information, and (dis)similarity of the choice alternatives. A special focus is o...

Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) programs are considered as a way to improve learning outcomes of students. However, little is known on the schools who implement such programs as well as on the effectiveness of similar information and communication technology programs. We provide a literature review that pays special attention to the existing ca...

ICT infrastructure investments in educational institutions have been one of the key priorities of education policy during the last decade. Despite the attention, research on the effectiveness and efficiency of ICT is inconclusive. This is mainly due to small-scale research with weak identification strategies which lack a proper control group. Using...

This paper fills a noticeable gap in the current economic and penology literature by proposing new performance enhancing policies based on an efficiency analysis of a sample of male prisons in England and Wales. In addition, we advance the empirical literature by integrating the managerialism of four strategic functions of prisons, employment and a...

Major changes in municipal solid waste (MSW)-related services, such as the collection system, often require important initial investments, while the benefits on the output side typically occur over a longer time perspective. However, when analyzing the association between such policy choices and cost efficiency of MSW collection and disposal, the t...

Despite the increased attention to students leaving secondary education without a diploma numerous students still dropout yearly. This paper makes a distinction between the ‘individual perspective’ and the ‘institutional perspective’ of dropping out. The former is explored by multinominal logit models. We observe that particularly motivation of the...

In order to exploit economies of scale Belgian municipalities regularly cooperate in the provision of waste related services. In particular for the collection and separation of household packaging waste, municipalities appear to seek technical and cost efficiency gains by cooperating via municipal waste joint ventures. Although most Belgian municip...

The non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach is increasingly used to construct composite indicators for country performance monitoring, benchmarking, and policy evaluation in a large variety of fields. The flexibility in the definition of aggregation weights is praised as the method's most important advantage: DEA allows each evaluated cou...

Teaching and research are widely regarded as the two key activities of academics. We propose a tailored version of the popular Data Envelopment Analysis methodology to evaluate the overall performance of university faculty. The methodology enables accounting for the potential presence of economies of scope between the teaching and research activiti...

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the multidimensional nature of local policing and account for chara...

This paper proposed an adjusted "shared-input" version of the popular efficiency measurement technique Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) that enables evaluating municipality waste collection and processing performances in settings in which one input (waste costs) is shared among treatment efforts of multiple municipal solid waste fractions. The main...

This paper proposes an adjusted version of the popular efficiency measurement technique data envelopment analysis (DEA) that makes it possible (1) to evaluate the cost efficiency of municipalities in the collection and processing of multiple household waste fractions, (2) robustifying the cost efficiency evaluations for the impact of measurement er...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose a non-parametric methodology to construct composite scores of citizen satisfaction with local police services. More precisely, the paper advocates a custom made version of the popular Data Envelopment Analysis approach, also referred to as the "Benefit-of-the-Doubt" model. The key advantage of this...

We propose a non-parametric methodology to study the presence of economies of scope between teaching and research (i.e., the teaching-research nexus). In particular, the paper advocated a conditional version of the ‘benefit-of-the-doubt’ approach to estimate the relationship between the professors’ overall academic output, measured by a composite m...

The effectiveness of problem based learning (PBL) in terms of increasing student knowledge and skills has been extensively studied for higher education students and in non-experimental settings. This paper tests the effectiveness of PBL as an alternative instruction method in secondary education. In a controlled randomized experiment, we estimate i...

This paper uses a robust (order-m) Data Envelopment Analysis approach to evaluate the efficiency of Tour de France cycling teams for the period 2007- 2011. Since there are multiple ways in which this event can be successful for a cycling team, we take it that managers face strategic input decisions regarding team and rider characteristics. Specific...

This paper proposes an adjusted version of the popular efficiency measurement technique Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) that makes it possible (1) to evaluate the cost efficiency of municipalities in the collection and processing of multiple household waste fractions, (2) robustifying the cost efficiency evaluations for the impact of measurement er...

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the multidimensional nature of local policing and account for chara...

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy, using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on the Data Envelopment Analysis literature. Given the setting of evaluating...

Purpose – This paper proposes a benefit of the doubt (BoD) approach to construct and analyse teacher effectiveness scores (i.e. SET scores). Design/methodology/approach – The BoD approach is related to data envelopment analysis (DEA), a linear programming tool for evaluating the relative efficiency performance of a set of similar units (e.g. firms...

Students' evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities. However, SETs are controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) teachers value various aspects of excellent teaching differently, and (2) SETs should not be determined on exogenous influences. Therefore, this paper constructs SETs using a tailored version of th...

We study the impact of some local policies aimed at municipal solid waste (MSW) reduction on the cost efficiency of MSW collection and disposal. We explicitly account for differences between municipalities in background conditions by using a bootstrapped version of the Data Envelopment Analysis methodology in combination with a matching technique....

Despite their increasing popularity, teaching and research evaluations of university faculty remain the subject of criticism. Much of the debate has revolved around the lack of a well-established evaluation methodology, with the existing evaluation practices of providing teachers and researchers with an overall score (i.e., SET- and RES-score) equa...

We study the impact of some local policies aimed at municipal solid waste (MSW) reduction on the cost efficiency of MSW collection and disposal. We explicitly account for differences between municipalities in background conditions by using a bootstrapped version of the Data Envelopment Analysis methodology in combination with a matching technique....

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy, using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on the Data Envelopment Analysis literature. Given the setting of evaluating...

This paper presents a methodology to aggregate multidimensional research output. Using a tailored version of the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis model, we account for the large heterogeneity in research output and the individual researcher preferences by endogenously weighting the various output dimensions. The approach offers three import...

This paper presents a methodology to aggregate multidimensional research output. Using a tailored version of the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis model, we account for the large heterogeneity in research output and the individual researcher preferences by endogenously weighting the various output dimensions. The approach offers three import...

Although a priori company screening is a constitutive feature of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds, it is not easy to substantiate that such screening effectively differentiates between companies on the basis of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) calibre. Fundamentally, this is because CSR comprises several dimensions for which a...

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the bounds of the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on a recent offspring in the Data Envelopment Analysis literatur...

Although benevolent (BoD) weighting has some appealing features for the construction of evaluation scores of teacher performance (i.e., SET-scores), it still suffers from an important drawback in its basic form: the sensitivity of its outcomes to the influence of potential outliers, extreme values, and potential measurement error in the data. The r...

Despite their increasing use, composite indicators remain controversial. The undesirable dependence of countries’ rankings on the preliminary normalization stage, and the disagreement among experts/stakeholders on the specific weighting scheme used to aggregate sub-indicators, are often invoked to undermine the credibility of composite indicators....

Composite indicators are regularly used for benchmarking countries’ performance, but equally often stir controversies about the unavoidable subjectivity that is connected with their construction. Data Envelopment Analysis helps to overcome some key limitations, viz., the undesirable dependence of final results from the preliminary normalization of...

Although a priori company screening is a constitutive feature of socially responsible investment (SRI) funds, it is not easy to substantiate that such screening effectively differentiates between companies on the basis of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) calibre. Fundamentally, this is because CSR comprises several dimensions for which a...