By using a heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model, this paper focuses on how students' exogenous characteristics (such as personal demographic information, pre-enrollment educational background and household economic status) affect faculties’ inefficiency. Using individual data on freshmen...

This paper applies a data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to assess technical efficiency of both private and public universities in Italy. Moving from the traditional context where inputs and outputs are assumed to be non-negative, a directional distance function approach has been applied in...

Using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set, we investigate the effect of religion on subjective well-being (SWB), specifically taking into account the implication of selection effects explaining religious influence. In order to measure the level of religious involvement, we...

In this paper, we test whether economic growth depends on human capital development using data disaggregated at territorial level and propose the use of efficiency estimates, measured using a non-parametric technique, as an alternative quality measure of higher education institutions (HEIs). The...

The vulnerability of health sector to corruption lies in the complex interaction between the social environment and the institutional setting of health systems. We investigate this interaction in the case of Italy, speci�cally looking at the impact of corruption on health expenditure. In Italy...

The rationale for fiscal rules and institutions has been explained by the existence of deficit and spending biases that arise due to political fragmentation within government or between governments that alternate in office. In common pool models fiscal outcomes are determined by the...