Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a...

In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students’ mathematical competencies. Our analysis benefits from a new data set that merges the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with territorial data...

We discuss how a schooling system’s structure may imply that private school enrolment leads to worse subsequent performance in further education or in the labour market, and we seek evidence of such phenomena in Italian data. If students differ not only in terms of their families’ ability to...

In this paper we provide a new methodology to measure opportunity inequality and to decompose overall inequality in an "ethically offensive" and an "ethically acceptable" part. Moreover, we provide some empirical applications of these new evaluation tools: in the first exercise, we compare the...

School vouchers introduced recently in some Italian regions have lowered the cost of private schools. On one side, we provide evidence that Italian private schools may be selected for different reasons than quality considerations. On the other side, by exploiting individual data on voucher...

Intergenerational mobility in income and education is affected by the influence of parents on children’s school choices. Our focus is on the role played by different school systems in reducing or magnifying the impact of parents on children’s school choices and therefore on intergenerational...

It is commonly believed that accumulation of human capital (HC) and availability of physical and financial capitals are among the major determinants of economic growth. In a globalised world, where factors of production are increasingly mobile, the process of domestic accumulation of HC might be...

In this paper we show that there is a reduction in the correlation coefficient between father and children schooling levels over time in Italy. However, focusing on equality of circumstances, we show that there is still a persistent difference in the odds of attaining a college degree between...

We examine what determines differences across countries and over time in the distribution of personal incomes in the OECD. We first model the wage determination process and show that unemployment, the labour share, and the wage differential are all functions of labour market institutions. Next...

The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative survey of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children attendance of public and private schools and parents’ self-assessment of the quality of public schools in the city of...