In this paper, we analyse the effects of teaching reforms in Italy. These were introduced in 1999, and changed the entire organization of university courses, where the Bachelor-Master (BA-MA) structure was adopted. The first step is to define the production process of higher education (HE). This...

In many countries, governments abandoned negotiated methods for allocating public resources among universities, moving towards the adoption of formula-funding models. From a policy perspective, a relevant issue is to correctly design such formulas, to stimulate universities in pursuing better...

The objective of this paper is an efficiency analysis about Higher Education (HE) systems in European countries. We employ data extracted from the OECD datasets (Education at a Glance, several years), both (1) computing an "overall" Performance Indicator and (2) using a non-parametric technique...

The growing internationalization of European Higher Education requires more emphasis on cross-country comparisons. In this paper, an efficiency analysis of Italian and Spanish universities is conducted; as well as from a comparative perspective. The efficiency scores are obtained using Data...

This paper studies the relationship between university institutional autonomy (both formal and informal) and their performance and efficiency using multi-stage empirical methodology. First, we measure an “autonomy-in-use” index, and then we employ Data Envelopment Analysis in order to...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of receiving financial aid for a cohort of students who enrolled at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in the year 2007/08, through a Propensity Score Matching approach. Using administrative data about these students for four years, we were able to evaluate the...