In the context of policy reforms in Higher Education in both the UK and Italy, we review recent evidence on student outcomes in higher education and subsequent transitions into the labour market for both these countries. We also provide the results of some new analysis for each of the two and,...

We show that a firm’s profits under Cournot oligopoly can be increasing in the number of firms in the industry if wages are determined by (decentralised) bargaining in unionised oligopoly. The intuition for the result is that increased product market competition following an increase in the...

We show that whether trade is one-way or two-way depends on wage strategies adopted by trade unions. The union’s wage strategy choices themselves depend upon the conditions under which trade takes place, as well as upon the characteristics of both the labour and the product markets in the...

We show that, contrary to the key result of the standard Cournot-Nash oligopoly model, industry profits can increase with the number of firms if input prices are not exogenous but are determined by bargaining in bilateral oligopoly. The relationship between industry profits and market size is...

As in much of Europe, and in the particular context of the Bologna Convention on tertiary education, the Italian university system has experienced substantial reform in recent years, the major aims of which include increasing the participation, progression and retention rates of students in...