Vita e Pensiero

The paper deals with the effects of formal education on workers’ earnings comparatively for Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, three countries of Western Europe with three alternative combinations of stratification/standardisation processes and vocational specificity in their education systems...

In this paper we show an approach to assessing both the impact of business cycles on economic indicators and on the underlying macroeconomic variables and one of these variables in nowcasting GDP: this approach is based on the real-time ability of financial and real variables to reproduce business cycles...

Nonlinear CUB models have been recently introduced in the literature to model ordinal data taking into account the unequal spacing among response categories. Nonlinear CUB models can be effectively used in a variety of fields, typically when human perceptions and attitudes are measured by questionnaires with questions having ordered response categories...

Well known Simpson’s paradox is puzzling and surprising for many, especially for the empirical researchers and users of statistics. However there is no surprise as far as mathematical details are concerned. A lot more is written about the paradox but most of them are beyond the grasp of such users...

In this paper we consider the problem of the evaluation of undergraduate and graduate courses, in the context of Italian universities...

Composite indicators are very useful in addressing complex variables that cannot be directly observed: they can be used to assess for example quality of life and customer satisfaction...

This paper deals the estimation of a finite population median in the presence of an auxiliary variable. Two methods based on the regression estimator are studied along with the ratio estimator and the median’s estimator without auxiliary variable...