The Consumer Empowerment Index is a pilot exercise, aimed at obtaining a first snapshot of the state of consumer empowerment as measured by the Eurobarometer survey (Special Eurobarometer n. 342). It is neither a final answer on empowerment nor a comprehensive study on all the different facets...

This paper examines the use of game theory in educational sciences. It describes the evolution of game theory from the defining axioms of Von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1944 to the present. After the Introduction and this description, the third part presents the methodology used to select...

The importance of a highly skilled workforce has become increasingly relevant in the context of the European Union new strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth - ‘Europe 2020’. At the individual level, a good education is increasingly decisive for employment prospects and...

In a context of intensive and global economic competition, European countries are growingly concerned with the consequences of increasing numbers of young people temporarily or permanently prevented from entering the job market and the difficulties faced by college and university graduates to...

This report describes concisely, and in an intuitive way, the policy evaluation framework and the different counterfactual analysis evaluation strategies: propensity score matching, regression discontinuity design, differences-in-differences and instrumental variables. For each method we present...

The importance of a highly skilled workforce has become increasingly relevant in the context of the European Union’s new strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth — ‘Europe 2020’. Policies encouraging wide participation in continuing training are therefore an important...

This work explores the effects of cross-border relocation of production on the skill composition of Italian manufacturing firms. Its aim is to assess if the firms’ strategy to offshore production activities towards cheap labor countries determines a bias in the relative employment of skilled...

Aim of this paper is to study whether and how the firm’s decision to outsource production activities affects its technological performance. In particular, we look at how the alignment between the firm’s governance strategy and the underlying attributes of the transactions affects the capacity...

Aim of this paper is to explore the main drivers of outsourcing of knowledge intensive business services by Italian manufacturing firms. While anecdotal and empirical evidence has emphasized labour cost and scale economies as behind firms’ choices to outsource production or service activities,...