Suchergebnisse

This study analyses the relationship between education and material well-being from a longitudinal perspective using the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data collected in Italy in four waves (2009-2012). It has two main aims: (i) to measure household material well-being on the basis of householders' responses to multiple survey items (addressed to gather information on the household availability of material resources) by advancing indexes, which can account for global and relative divergences in households' material well-being across survey waves; (ii) to assess how education and other sociodemographic characteristics affect absolute well-being and its variation (i.e. relative well-being) in the time span considered. Both aims are pursued, combining measuring and explanatory modelling approaches. That is, the use of the Multilevel Item Response Theory model allows to measure the global household material well-being and its yearly variation (i.e. relative material well-being) in the four waves. Meanwhile, the use of a multivariate (and multivariate multilevel) regression model allows to assess the effects of education and other sociodemographic characteristics on both components (absolute and relative well-being), controlling for the relevant sources of heterogeneity in the data. The value added to using the proposed methodologies with the main findings and economic implications are discussed.

A central question for education authorities has become "which factors make a territory attractive for tertiary students?". Tertiary education is recognised as one of the most important assets for the development of a territory, thus students' mobility becomes a brain drain issue whenever there are prevalent areas that attract students from other territories. In this paper, we try to identify the most important factors that could affect student mobility in Italy. In doing that we analyse students' flows across competing territorial areas which supply tertiary education programs. We will consider a wide range of determinants related to the socio-economic characteristics of the areas as well as resources of the universities in the territories in terms of variety and quantity of the degree programs there available, financial endowments provided by Central Government, and services available to students. The Bradley-Terry modelling approach based on pair comparisons has been adopted to define the attractiveness of competing territories and assess how much the detected divergences can be attributed to factors directly related to the considered characteristics of the universities in the territory and how much is ascribable to inherent characteristics of the areas where the universities are located such as the labour market conditions. Furthermore, the adopted approach allows us to consider uncertainty in defining territorial attractiveness and making comparisons. In this way, we would like to provide some evidences to assess if the rules currently used by the Central Government to finance public universities on the basis of their capabilities to attract students really reward the efforts made by the university system in the area to improve their standard of quality or, on the contrary, reward the territorial features.