This paper explores the relationship between bank market concentration and financial stability of financial institutions relying on highly territorially disaggregated data taken at municipality level in Italy between 2001 and 2012. Firstly, we test the existence of a U-shaped relationship...

By using a heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model, this paper focuses on how students' exogenous characteristics (such as personal demographic information, pre-enrollment educational background and household economic status) affect faculties’ inefficiency. Using individual data on freshmen...

This paper applies a data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to assess technical efficiency of both private and public universities in Italy. Moving from the traditional context where inputs and outputs are assumed to be non-negative, a directional distance function approach has been applied in...

In this paper, we test whether economic growth depends on human capital development using data disaggregated at territorial level and propose the use of efficiency estimates, measured using a non-parametric technique, as an alternative quality measure of higher education institutions (HEIs). The...

Using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set, we investigate the effect of religion on subjective well-being (SWB), specifically taking into account the implication of selection effects explaining religious influence. In order to measure the level of religious involvement, we...

This paper investigates the regional innovation system (RIS) efficiency, and its determinants, in Italy through a Stochastic Frontier Analysis and using the concept of a knowledge production function. The contribution of universities’, private and public sectors’ resources devoted to...

In recent years more and more numerous are the rankings published in the newspapers or technical reports available, covering many aspects of higher education, but in many cases with very conflicting results between them, due to the fact that universities’ performances depend on the set of...

This paper analyses how national income (per capita real GDP) influences the environmental pollution (per capita CO2 emissions) using a very heterogenous sample composed by 120 countries during the 2000-2009 period. We firstly apply a panel unit root test suggested by Im et al. (2003) in order...

In this paper we have investigated the impact of the level of education on the number of children in Italy. We have selected 1,490 families from the 1997- 2005 Longitudinal Investigation on Italian Families (ILFI) dataset. Our dependent variable is represented by the number of children ever born...

In this paper we analyse the correlation between the level of education and the number of children in Italy. We select 10,720 Italian families from the 2004-2007 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. Our dependent variable is represented by the number of...