Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...

Public systems of higher education have recently attempted to cut costs by providing financial incentives to institutions who reduce the diversity of their programs. We study the profit and welfare effects of reducing product diversity in higher education, against the background of a funding...

This paper provides a comparative examination of how public universities in two countries, the United States and Israel, have evolved over the past few decades - and how differences between the two have culminated in a rate of academic brain drain from the latter to the former that is...

We analyze the determinants of participation (whether to study) and schooling (where and what to study) in a public system of higher education, based on a unique dataset of all eligible high school pupils in an essentially closed region (Flanders). We find that pupils perceive the available...

We examine whether the (research) quality of a country’s higher education system drives macro-flows of foreign tertiary students in Europe. We use various measures on the quality of a country’s higher education system in an extended gravity model. We find that quality has a positive and...

In recent years the British National Health Service (NHS) has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this Paper, we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction for nurses and...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset of firms and workers to investigate the relationship between the firm’s lifecycle and the reallocation of labour. We distinguish labour reallocation associated with job reallocation, and reallocation of workers over a fixed configuration of jobs. We find...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by firms when they fire a worker. The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favourable to the productivity of the job. We analyse employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effects of the Italian reform of 1990 on worker and job flows. We exploit the fact that this reform increased unjust dismissal costs for firms below 15 employees, while leaving dismissal costs unchanged for bigger...