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...

In this paper, a multilevel analysis is applied to the OECD-PISA2006 data with the aim to compare factors affecting students’ achievement across Italy and Spain. The findings show that both countries are affected by strong internal regional heterogeneity, where some regions have achievement...

In this study, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to compute efficiency scores for a sample of Italian schools by employing OECD-PISA2006 data aggregated at school level. Efficiency has been defined as the ability to transform inputs (resources, student background, etc.) into outputs...

In this article we investigated whether academic departments do experience a trade-off among different research outputs. More specifically, we define four types of academic research outputs: quantity (publications); quality (citation indexes); research funds obtained through research grants; and...