This paper studies the role of the expansion of higher education supply in increasing the equality of post-secondary education opportunities. It examines Italy�s experience during the 1990s, when policy changes prompted universities to offer a wider range of degree courses and to open new...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the characteristics of Irish households that have a member participating in higher education, using surveys of Irish households collected in 1994-95 and 1999-2000. The results do not show a significant effect of income; this is notable, especially alongside the...

This paper reports estimates of the UK “college premium” for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006 - a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand...

This paper provides findings from the UK Labour Force Surveys from 1993 to 2003 on the financial private returns to a degree – the “college premium”. The data covers a decade when the university participation rate doubled – yet we find no significant evidence that the mean return to a...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

The recent industrial action taken by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has given the issue of academic pay high prominence in the UK press. There appears to be a remarkable consensus that higher education academic salaries are too low, relative to other groups of workers in the UK,...

University-Business Cooperation (UBC) is a relationship in flux, reflecting issues specific to the transition from an industrial to a knowledge society. UBC is undergoing a transformation from a dyadic university-business relationship, aimed at solving firm problems, sourcing new products or...

We investigate the impact of information about student satisfaction on university choice, using data from the UK’s National Student Survey (NSS) and on applications to undergraduate degree courses. We show that the NSS has a small, statistically significant effect on applications at the...

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on its impact on local innovative performance: some empirical analyses emphasize a positive effect, others speak about a ‘dark side’ of social capital. This paper...

We analyse how the labour market implicitly evaluates Italy's higher education system by estimating differences in employment and earnings across universities. We use our estimates to produce three rankings of universities based, respectively, on employment, earnings and employment-weighted...