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

I investigate the role of competition in explaining Italian schools' performance through OECD-PISA2006 data. In a baseline model, three competition indicators are included separately; when allowing their presence simultaneously and the interaction terms, a different (and more realistic) story...

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...

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,...

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...

In this paper, we consider the problem of determining technical efficiency of the Italian universities, focusing on policy and benchmarking implications. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), the individual university's efficiency is computed. We run several elaborations matching teaching and...

“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...