Since the mid-1990s, Italy's economic growth faltered, primarily due to sluggish productivity growth. This article investigates the root causes of the slow growth. Firstly, it benchmarks Italy over time vis-à-vis euro area and OECD countries in the area of human capital, product market...

State investment in service activities of the public sector, as well as the financial returns analyzed from the aspect of service effectiveness and utilization of public goods, can be considered as one of the most significant dilemmas, especially in the field of education. When analyzing state...

Despite measures on the European level to increase the compatibility between the HE sectors of the member states, the recent literature exposes variations in their efficiencies. To gain insights into these differences we split the efficiency term according to the two management levels each...

This paper studies optimal education subsidies when parental transfers are unequally distributed across students and cannot be publicly observed. After documenting substantial inequality in parental transfers among US college students with similar family resources, I examine its implications for...

Intergovernmental fiscal frameworks usually reflect fundamental societal choices and history and are not foremost geared towards achieving economic policy objectives. Yet, like most institutional arrangements, fiscal relations affect the behaviour of firms, households and governments and thereby...

This paper uses data envelopment analys is to investigate the extent to which universities in the United States have undergone productivity and efficiency changes, partly due to managerial performance, during the 2005-09 academic years. Using panel data for 133 research and doctoral...

At the regional scale, human capital and agglomeration forces are assumed to shape innovative capacity, but there are likely to be more direct channels like the development and commercialization of new products. This article examines the relationship between inventive activity and productivity...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

Persson and Tabellini (2003) show that presidential regimes and majoritarian election systems have important effects on fiscal policy, government effectiveness and productivity. Here, their dataset is extended in a number of ways: the number of countries included is increased from 85 to up to...

In this paper, we quantitatively assess the welfare implications of alternative public education spending rules. To this end, we employ a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which human capital externalities and public education expenditures, financed by distorting taxes, enhance the...