Educational systems can be characterized by a complex structure: students, classes and teachers, schools and principals, and providers of education. The added value of schools is likely influenced by all these levels and, especially, by interactions between them. We illustrate the ability of...

Despite measures on the European level to increase the compatibility between the HE sectors of the member states, the recent literature exposes variations in their efficiencies. To gain insights into these differences we split the efficiency term according to the two management levels each...

Merit requirements in need-based student aid may exacerbate inequality in higher education but at the same time improve efficiency of aid expenditure by increasing on-time graduation, for instance. Disentangling the effect of the two building blocks of student aid ("need" and "merit") is...

In this paper we examine and compare the efficiency of Italian and German public universities and its evolution in the period 2001-2007. This topic is particularly important because of two main reasons: (i) as the universities are funded through public money in both countries, it is necessary to...

The Italian educational system is strictly regulated by the Ministry of Education. However, there are strong differences in educational inputs and outputs among Regions, as can be noticed by analyzing the allocation of public budgets to the Regions and their students' (average) performance in...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of receiving a financial aid for a cohort of students who enrolled at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in the year 2007/08, through a Propensity Score Matching approach. Using administrative data about these students for four years, we were able to evaluate the...

This paper studies the effect of merger policies in Russia on university efficiency. We consider the non-voluntary merger policy conducted by the Ministry of Education and Science based on university performance indicators. First, the efficiency scores of universities are estimated using a...