Subject: The education in mathematics, its failure and costs, and how to redesign this market. The political economy of mathematics education. Method: We do not require statistics to show that mathematics education fails but can look at the math itself. Criticism on mathematics itself can only...

We consider policy evaluations when SUTVA is violated because of the presence of interference among units. We propose to explicitly model interactions as a function of units characteristics. Our approach is applied to the evaluation of a policy implemented in Tuscany (a region in Italy) on small...

In this study several matching procedures have been used to evaluate the impact of public R&D support received by Italian manufacturing firms over the three-year period 2004-2006. Data are from the Capitalia-UniCredit survey and estimations refer to a sample of 605 treated firms untreated are...

In this paper we analyse the effect of an Italian training program on the re-employment probability of young unemployed workers. The program consists solely of workplace training and is coordinated by employment centre, but it is fully implemented by firms. We develop a discrete duration...

In the mid-2000s, U.S. anti-opium policy intensified with a goal of reducing the resources available to Afghan insurgents. To achieve this objective, I show that opium suppression efforts must accurately distinguish between insurgent and non-insurgent suppliers. The required level of accuracy...

This paper attempts to assess whether participation in a microfinance program helps households generate personal savings, as distinct from savings through compulsory contributions to the program. We consider a microfinance program initiated by the Government of India (the SGSY scheme),which is...

According to the existing evidence some higher education admission tests may be screening out students who, despite a relative lack of specific knowledge, possess as much intellectual ability as their peers. If this is the case, students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are likely to...

We analyse the impact of business incentives on the technical efficiency of Italian manufacturing firms. Using DEA allows a novel treatment of the omitted-variable and sample-selection bias. Through DEA one carries out direct comparisons between similar observations akin to those carried out in...

Executive Summary: Iowa offers several tax incentive programs that have been utilized by biofuel producers. The tax credit programs include the Enterprise Zone Program (EZ), the New Jobs and Income Program (NJIP), the New Capital Investment Program (NCIP), and the High Quality Job Creation...

Policy evaluation is a complex task. Most approaches now adopt a mixed method approach combining both quantitative and qualitative techniques. A shortcoming of the standard approaches is that they fail to measure or investigate deeper perceptions of the policy. In this paper the usefulness of...