This paper deals with the reforming processes in higher education (HE) from centralized systems towards more competitive ones. In particular, I discuss these issues referring to the Italian case, and the market-like mechanisms introduced in it during 1990s and 2000s.The focus of the paper is in...

This paper estimates the effect of an administrative change in a voucher policy implemented by an Italian Regional government. The voucher has been installed in 2000, and is intended to help families that want enroll their children in private schools. In 2008/09, the policy has been changed,...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of receiving 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...

In this study, we have carried out an empirical investigation on the potential differences in school performance between pupils attending public schools and those attending private schools in the most densely populated region of Italy (Lombardy), employing a new dataset of about 77,000 students...

In most countries which experience structural transformation of their higher education system, a crucial goal of policy makers is to tie the amount of university public funding to their performance. This research analyzes the Russian performance-based funding (PBF) reform to provide a...

In Italy, the process of devolving more powers on educational matters to Regions and schools poses some relevant policy challenges, among which the necessity to determine “standard” costs for schools stands as a major priority. In this paper, we propose an approach based on cost functions...

We estimate a variety of models to evaluate costs in US higher education institutions. A novel feature of our approach involves the estimation of latent class and random parameter stochastic frontier models of the multiproduct cost function. This allows us fully to accommodate both the...

In this paper we study the feasibility of the European EU2020 goal of increasing the number of higher education graduates, considering large differences in incentives and funding schemes between countries in Europe. We conduct an efficiency analysis on 13 Dutch and 58 Italian public...

As governments around the world struggle with doing more with less, efficiency analysis climbs to the top of the policy agenda. This paper derives efficiency measures for more than 8,600 schools in 30 countries, using PISA 2012 data and a bootstrap version of Data Envelopment Analysis as a...