This research studies the short-term effects of the Russian Excellence Initiative Project 5to100 on participating universities. To trace the effect, we develop a quasi-experimental econometric methodology. A control group of universities comparable to the Project 5to100 universities at the...

In many countries, governments abandoned negotiated methods for allocating public resources among universities, moving towards the adoption of formula-funding models. From a policy perspective, a relevant issue is to correctly design such formulas, to stimulate universities in pursuing better...

Participation rates in higher education (HE) are an important indicator to pursue one of the main European policy objectives, which is to increase the proportion of population attending HE. A model used to detect the determinants of participation rates is proposed in this paper, and it is...

Recent policy suggestions from the European Community underlined the importance of “efficiency” and “equity” in the provision of education while, at the same time, the European countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money devoted...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of competition on the performance of Italian secondary schools as measured by Maths achievement scores (PISA 2006 dataset). Competition is measured by an indicator of ‘perceived’ competition (generated from an answer provided by the schools’...

National policy initiatives require the expenditure of large amounts of resources over several years. It is common for these initiatives to generate large amounts of data that are needed in order to assess their success. Educational policies are an obvious example. Here we concentrate on...

This paper studies the relationship between university institutional autonomy (both formal and informal) and their performance and efficiency using multi-stage empirical methodology. First, we measure an “autonomy-in-use” index, and then we employ Data Envelopment Analysis in order to...

School rankings based on value-added (VA) estimates are subject to prediction errors, since VA is defined as the difference between predicted and actual performance. We introduce a more flexible random forest (RF), rooted in the machine learning literature, to minimize prediction errors and to...

This paper explores the black box behind efficiency measurements in higher education and defines the determinants of university efficiency. Particularly, it investigates how the efficiency of universities is affected by the characteristics of the territory in which they operate. We propose an...

In this paper we examine and compare the efficiency of Italian and German public universities and its evolution in the period 2001-2007. This topic is particularly important because of two main reasons: (i) as the universities are funded through public money in both countries, it is necessary to...