The paper analyses Islamic finance from the central bank and supervisory authority�s perspective, focusing on the European and Italian context. It depicts a rapidly expanding sector, with recent annual growth rates of between 10 and 15 percent and a geographical presence that now reaches...

Assembling information from several sources and a drawing on specially designed new survey, this paper finds that the shortfall in the supply of child care facilities remains large with respect to potential demand but is less severe with respect to the effective demand by households in Italy....

The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was...

This paper provides a survey of a number of studies conducted in recent years, above all at the Bank of Italy, aiming at assessing the quality and the efficiency of public services in Italy. We consider services provided by the central government (education and civil justice), regional...

Since the late eighties the Italian National Health System, in particular hospital care, has undergone deep reforms. This paper evaluates the technical efficiency of Italian public hospitals in light of the main features of the hospital system at a regional level. The evaluation was carried out...

Over the last decade two reforms have affected the Italian hospital system, one introducing market mechanisms, the other concerning the tools of planning and expense control assigned to the regional governments. The paper summarizes these institutional changes and describes the evolution of the...

We estimate the contemporaneous effect of education on adolescent crime by exploiting the variation in crime rates between different cohorts and at different ages that followed a reform that raised the school-leaving age in Italy. A 1 percentage-point increase of the enrollment rate reduces...

The paper considers the teachers� labour market in Italy. The quality and motivation of teachers are certainly among the determinants of pupils� achievement, but they are difficult to measure, so we examine the composition of the pool of teachers and their behaviour to infer...

In this paper we propose and validate cheating in standardized tests as a new indirect measure of social capital. Given the low-stakes nature of most of the tests examined here, we interpret the widespread presence of cheating as a signal of limited trustin central education authorities....

Investment in public research in Italy is below the European average as a percentage of GDP. Nevertheless, in relation to expenditure and the number of researchers, the output is high, and the quality of research, conducted in universities and research organizations, is close to that of such...