Non-academic staff and technical efficiency of Russian universities 2012–2021

This paper investigates the relationship between the proportion of non-academic staff in universities and their organizational efficiency of Russian universities. Recognizing the differing production functions of research-intensive and teaching-intensive universities, we implement two distinct model specifications in efficiency estimation. A novel panel conditional order-m efficiency estimator is applied, incorporating the share of non-academic staff and the time variable (2012–2021) as simultaneous exogenous factors. The findings demonstrate that the inclusion of these exogenous variables affects the variance of efficiency scores differently in teaching-intensive and research-intensive universities. For research-intensive universities, no robust evidence emerges to suggest a statistically significant relationship between the share of non-academic staff and institutional efficiency. In contrast, teaching-intensive universities exhibit a positive relationship between the proportion of non-academic staff and efficiency, both in the full sample and in analyses of specific years. An extension of the empirical analysis (possible only for 2019) reveals a positive association between the proportion of specifically administrative staff and efficiency.