CEMAPRE/ISEG Research is organising a Seminar on 'A novel econometric analysis of public and private schools' efficiency in Italy', on 8 May, between 11.00 and 12.00, in ISEG's Lecture Theatre 1 (Quelhas, 4th Floor).
The guest speaker will be the Professor Tommaso Agasisti, of Politecnico di Milano School of Management, who will present the paper 'A Comparative Analysis of Public and Private Schools in Italy (with a Focus on Socioemotional Skills)', the abstract for which can be found below.
Free admission, subject to room capacity.
Abstract
The present paper considers two main research questions: (i) what is the relative efficiency of Italian public and private schools in recent years? (ii) how does the inclusion of variables measuring the students' socioemotional skills affect the measurement of schools' efficiency? By answering these questions, the present paper advances the economic literature in this field in various directions. First, it provides an updated empirical view of the efficiency of public and private Italian schools. The existing studies are dated, and report results from the early 2000s - see Barbetta & Turati (2003) and Agasisti (2013). Given the continuing debate about the role of private schools for improving the level of the Italian educational system, it is important to observe if and how they are performing more efficiently than their public counterparts. Recent data and new evidence are needed, and this paper fills this gap. Second, the inclusion of indicators about socioemotional skills in the efficiency measurement of schools is a complete novelty. To the best of our knowledge, no existing academic papers tried to assess schools' efficiency considering also this dimension, with the notable exception of Vittadini et al. (2022) who, however, limited the empirical exercise to a very small sample of Italian schools in a special Province. Along with the empirical evidence of the effects of including these variables, we develop a theoretical discussion about how better to consider SES in modelling schools' efficiency.
We use data about 1,200 schools (almost 15% are private) from the OECD 2015, 2018 and 2022 editions. We use a bootstrap version of Data Envelopment Analysis as method for the empirical analysis (Simar & Wilson, 1998; 2000). DEA is a non-parametric technique widely adopted in the circumstances of schools' efficiency measurement (De Witte & Lopez Torres, 2017). To anticipate a preview of the main findings, the results indicate that private schools are statistically more efficient than public ones in all the three waves of PISA analyzed. Also, the well-known differences between schools located in North vs South Italy emerge (as in Di Giacomo & Pennisi, 2015), with the former being more efficient than the latter. When considering socioemotional skills in the educational production function, the efficiency differential between private and public schools widens - suggesting that private schools are better than public in developing this set of competences.
