Antonella Rita Ferrara (p), Philip McCann, Rosanna Nisticó

Alessandro Cusimano

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Balázs Kotosz (p)

Antonella Rita Ferrara

Nowadays the realization that certain economic units, universities or other objects have impact on the economy of their region comes more and more into prominence. The economic impact study has become a standard tool to persuade state legislatures of the importance of expenditures on higher education. The most general definition is as „the difference between existing economic activity in a region given the presence of the institution and the level that would have been present if the institution did not exist.” In the practice we face a series of problems: separation of net and gross impact, identification of universities’ missions, territorial level choice, statistical model choice, estimation of induced and catalytic impacts, etc. Different methods used in literature make results hardly comparable, thereby our focus is to recommend a method to investigate universities in different countries: in the lack of regional input-output matrices a multiplier based approach for first and second missions (education and research), while an application of a set of indicators for third mission (knowledge transfer related) activities. After a methodological review, we demonstrate our experiences based on research made in Hungary, France, Poland and Romania. These results also suggest that methods considering input size impacts will show a simple return of the state contribution in continental models. We also suggest methods to catch student knowledge related impact evaluation.

Alessandro Cusimano (p), Fabio Mazzola (p), Sylvain Barde

Balázs Kotosz

Classical approaches of counterfactual methods for policy evaluation have focused on the comparison of the different economic performances of treated and control units identified according to a binary assignment to treatment. However the most recent literature has discussed that, in order for the econometric methodologies to better fit the real design of public policies, the evaluator should recognize that the recipients of a program usually receive different “doses” of treatment according to their intrinsic characteristics or to the objectives of the policy under investigation. For this reason the forefront literature on policy evaluation has recently focused on the dose-response approach, which aims at linking the different quantities of treatment received by the recipients of a program, with some measure of performance. Several methods have been proposed at this extent in the recent literature on program evaluation. The objective of our work is to use some of these methodologies for the evaluation, at the territorial level, of a policy for local development implemented in Southern Italy during the last decade. In particular, we refer to the infrastructural interventions of the Territorial Integrated Projects realized in Sicily through the use of 2000-2006 European Structural funds. By implementing our empirical analysis at a territorial level we aim at linking the amount of public money received by the municipalities who were beneficiaries of the policy with their economic performances. In particular, by using Monit and Istat data we look at the effect of different “doses of treatment” on the employment and on the number of local units of the municipalities involved. We merge the results obtained through the application of the approach suggested by Cerulli (2014) and the one proposed by Hirano & Imbens (2004), and we provide empirical evidence of a dose-response function which assumes an inversed-U shape with respect to both the outcome measures. It seems therefore that the effectiveness of the policy is increasing as the amount of treatment increases, but only until a certain threshold, after which an increase in the dose of treatment has a decreasing effect. We interpret our results as an indication that the policy is effective at the territorial level and, more importantly, that the assignment of an intermediate amount of public funds looks the best strategy for the policy-maker. This effect could indeed reflect a difficulty faced by the municipalities in dealing with projects of huge dimensions that could present managerial and organizational difficulties.