Stakeholder perception on corporate reputation and management efficiency : Evidence from the Spanish Defence sector

The Spanish Ministry of Defence was the first to elaborate a Social Responsibility (SR) report stating that efficiency plays a leading role. The territorial organs to manage the image and trust in the armed forces, are given by the Spanish Defence Delegations (SDD), and all of them are certified with a seal of excellence. In this work, defence economics and analysis of efficiency line up with the concept of SR. The main aim is to analyse if SR policy has an effective influence and, as a consequence, a high degree of performance can be expected. To this end, given a set of discretionary variables, the efficiency of the 19 SDD during the 2015-2017 period is analysed by means of Data Envelopment Analysis technique. A bootstrap procedure is used to eliminate the bias of the estimates and obtain a robust ranking. The results show an unusual positive behavior in public sector