In this paper, we have employed data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2012 edition) on the EU-15 countries in order to investigate the relationship between (i) the way in which students use ICT at home for school-related purposes and (ii) their test scores...

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 Italy, the provision of educational ancillary services (like meals and school transportation) is in charge of the municipalities. We investigate whether municipalities differ in their efficiency when providing these services and whether such heterogeneity explains some portion of the...

In Italy, the provision of educational ancillary services (like meals and school transportation) is in charge of the municipalities. We investigate whether municipalities differ in their efficiency when providing these services and whether such heterogeneity explains some portion of the...

“Resilient students” are those who, despite their disadvantaged background, are able to obtain good educational results. This paper proposes a statistical procedure for identifying the proportion of resilient students for countries participating to OECD Programme for International Students...

This paper uses the OECD-PISA 2009 data for studying the factors associated with the probability of poor students being resilient, i.e. obtaining good test scores despite their disadvantaged socioeconomic background. The results reveal that not only students' individual characteristics matter,...

This research conducts a comparison of secondary schools’ efficiency in an international perspective, focusing on five economies in the European Union (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and employing an institutionlevel dataset built through data from the 2012 edition of the OECD’s...

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...