In 2000, the Lombardy Regional government introduced, for the first time in Italy, a voucher plan to stimulate families to enroll their children to private schools. After this intervention, many other Regions launched similar policies. Despite the high political attention to this theme in Italy,...

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...

The objective of this paper is an efficiency analysis about Higher Education (HE) systems in European countries. We employ data extracted from the OECD datasets (Education at a Glance, several years), both (1) computing an "overall" Performance Indicator and (2) using a non-parametric technique...

The determinants of student mobility are investigated in this paper. Theoretical considerations suggest that both the university characteristics and socio-economic conditions of the geographical areas in which they are located are important. An empirical analysis has been conducted using a...

The growing internationalization of European Higher Education requires more emphasis on cross-country comparisons. In this paper, an efficiency analysis of Italian and Spanish universities is conducted; as well as from a comparative perspective. The efficiency scores are obtained using Data...

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...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of teaching reforms in Italy. These were introduced in 1999, and changed the entire organization of university courses, where the Bachelor-Master (BA-MA) structure was adopted. The first step is to define the production process of higher education (HE). This...

A random parameters stochastic frontier model is applied to Italian data in order to evaluate the cost function and efficiency of higher education institutions. The method yields useful information about inter-institutional variation in cost structure and technical efficiency. Returns to scale...

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...

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...