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.

中文翻译：

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规模，兼并和效率：以荷兰房屋公司为例。

社会住房提供者的效率是一个有争议的问题。在荷兰，人们普遍认为，住房公司具有提高效率的巨大潜力。一个相关的问题是规模是否会影响效率，因为最近几十年来显示了公司间合并的趋势。本文提供了一个框架，可以使用数据包络分析和随机前沿分析（使用2001-2012年的面板数据）评估规模和合并对荷兰住房公司效率的影响。结果表明，大多数房屋公司在规模不经济的情况下运营，这意味着在大多数情况下合并是不可取的。但是，合并可能对纯技术效率产生有益的影响，因为它迫使组织重新考虑现有做法。