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...

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...

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...

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...

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of intra- and inter-industry spillover components on productivity of large International firms. We use data from all EU R&D investment scoreboards editions issued every year until 2011 by the JRC-IPTS (scoreboards). The analysis is based upon a new...

This study contributes to existing literature on firms’ innovative activity examining the influence of both internal firms’ physical and R&D capital, and external national and international knowledge spillovers. The paper presents a cross national analysis of United States, Japan and Europe...

This study contributes to existing literature on firms’ innovative activity examining the relationship between the R&D rivalry and spillovers at the firm level. In particular, we present an empirical analysis in United States, Japan and Europe based upon a new dataset composed of 879 worldwide...

This paper investigates the role of women’s education in the transition towards having a second child in Italy by using the Longitudinal Investigation on Italian Families (ILFI). By implementing a simple event-history model, we find a negative effect of women’s education on the transition...

In this paper we have investigated the relationship between human capital proxied by the schooling level and fertility decisions for some EU countries. For this purpose we have resorted to a dynamic random effect probit model controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and initial problem, by using...