Suchergebnisse

Efficiency in Higher Education Systems is an issue of crucial importance these days considering the strong dependence of this sector on public funds. Indeed in the context of the current economic crisis the evaluation of efficiency of education provision is a primary target for governments from a social viewpoint. In this context, this thesis seeks to fill a significant gap in the literature on the Italian higher education system, by looking at issues of efficiency and quality. The thesis consists of three essays. The first paper is strictly related to the estimation of the overall efficiency of Italian Universities during the last decade using appropriate recently introduced (Tsionas, 2002; Greene, 2005) econometric techniques. Efficiency is measured by taking into account the multidimensional nature of academic institutions which -by their nature- involved teaching, research and administrative activities as their primary dimensions. Going deeply into the issue of academics' efficiency, we should note that the main human capital stock of inputs for both the teaching and research dimensions consists of the academic body. Quality, competences and professionalism of professors are leading "determinants" of teaching and research of our universities. Therefore the selection mechanisms of academics and their recruitment rules gather a great importance in this context. To this purpose we notice that a decentralization of academic selection procedures was introduced in Italy in 1998 with the "Berlinguer reform" act. Second and the third paper of this thesis focus especially on the evaluation of the quality of those individuals who succeeded in competitive examinations to become associate, and full professors, and on the incentives to produce international research associated with different recruitment mechanisms (national versus local).

This paper investigates whether or not research quality is significantly associated with a university's ability to attract students from other provinces in Italy. First-university enrolments of students over the period 2003–11 are regressed on universities' research-quality indicators computed from various bibliometric databases using fixed-effects gravity models. The estimates suggest that research performance is a significant predictor of student enrolment, with estimated elasticities between 0.013 and 0.059, depending on the indicator used.

This chapter summarises the role of EU actions in supporting health care policies in the EU Member States, both looking at implemented actions and describing current priorities for the future. It argues that these coordinated actions can be beneficial for EU Member States by helping them to avoid duplication of effort and to attain economies of scale. Moreover, data sharing with proper safeguards can unleash vast amount of "learning what works" both for medical treatments and for healthcare sustainability measures. The need for this common learning appears ever more urgent while facing the health and economic consequences of the present pandemic.

We study career concerns in Italian academia. We mould our empirical analysis on the standard model of contests, formalised in the multi-unit all-pay auction. The number of posts, the number of applicants, and the relative importance of the criteria for promotion determine academics' effort and output. In Italian universities incentives operate only through promotion, and all appointment panels are drawn from strictly separated and relatively narrow scientific sectors: thus the parameters affecting payoffs can be measured quite precisely, and we take the model to a newly constructed dataset which collects the journal publications of all Italian university professors. Our identification strategy is based on a reform introduced in 1999, parts of which affected different academics differently. We find that individual researchers respond to incentives in the manner described by the theoretical model: roughly, more capable researchers respond to increases in the importance of the publications for promotion and in the competitiveness of the scientific sector by exerting more effort; less able researchers are discouraged by competition and do the opposite.

We study the problem of evaluating whether the selection from a set is close to the ordering of the set determined by an exogenously given measure. Our main result is that three axioms, two naturally capturing "dominance", and a stronger one imposing a form of symmetry in the comparison of selections, are sufficient to evaluate how close any selection from any set is to the given ordering of the set. This closeness is given by a very simple index, which is a linear function of the sum of the ranks of the selected elements. The paper ends by relating this index to the existing literature on distance between orderings, and also offers a practical application of the index.

Background: In Italy, copayment has changed its nature and it can no longer be simply considered a system to curb inappropriate expenditure. It has become an important form of revenue for public health care provision, but it might also become a source of distortions in income and health benefits redistribution. Methods: We use a rich administrative dataset gathering information on patients demand (whose records have been matched to income declared for tax purposes) to study the effects of an additional copayment (the so called "superticket" introduced by the Italian government in 2012) in Lombardy, the biggest Italian Region whose socio-economic dimension is comparable to that of many European countries (e.g., the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc.). Results: Our analysis shows that at the aggregate level the non-uniform superticket schedule adopted in Lombardy is slightly pro-poor, but this result coexists with evidences pointing towards possible cases of restriction to access caused by the additional copayment. Conclusions: The introduction of the superticket and the ensuing increase in the out-of pocket payment for health care raises questions about the distribution of the burden among patients, and the sustainability of the extra revenue through time. This issue needs to be further investigated by combining health status data with the information in this dataset.