The relationship between socio-economic status and student achievement is well documented and a widespread literature indicates that students from more advantaged backgrounds perform better at school. Despite this relationship, several international assessments have highlighted that in each...

“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,...

<em>The influence of social and economic factors on competencies of Italian students. A multilevel analysis of data PISA 2006</em> - This work aims to investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students’ scientific competencies. The "Programme for International Student...

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...

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 article we investigated whether academic departments do experience a trade-off among different research outputs. More specifically, we define four types of academic research outputs: quantity (publications); quality (citation indexes); research funds obtained through research grants; and...