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This study analyzes the scientific profiles of doctorate holders who migrate in search of better job opportunities as a response to the increased temporariness and uncertainty of employment in their native country. Analyzing the career trajectories of the population of research-active Italian doctorate holders in economics, finance, and business management who graduated in the years 2008-2010, we find that those who are more likely to move abroad are those with the relatively best and worst research performances before migrating. Instead, those remaining in Italy are found to be on average of good scientific quality. Further, we find that the best performers target cross-border reputable universities for more prestigious careers, while the relatively lower performers generally move internationally to non-research-oriented institutions simply to look for an occupation. Migrant doctorate holders with average research performances do not differ from those staying in their native country. Our results have important policy implications as they contradict the popular belief that only the cream of the talented brains flee Italy.

Due to significant government cuts to Higher Education funding in Southern European systems, their already underfunded universities were forced to increasingly compete for students as sources of additional revenue. Concurrently, families and students that continued to afford participation in Higher Education became more selective when choosing a university, realising the riskier investment that Higher Education participation had become. Through a competing destinations model and relying on all Italian private and public universities, this study finds that the competition forces characterising universities' attractiveness over the last decade have changed since the financial crisis of 2008. In a context of lower demand for Higher Education, the competition for students grew and universities in close proximity were better prepared to face the new challenges, leading to the growth of Higher Education clusters.

In this study, we analyse the relationship between competition and programmatic diversification in 75 Italian universities from the academic years of 2003/2004 to 2011/2012. Results show that local competition, rather than national competition, influences programmatic diversification. The relationship between local competition and programmatic diversification is found to be quadratic such that when competition increases, diversification decreases and specialisation increases, and both relationships are reversed after a certain threshold. We argue that under moderate levels of competition, universities tend to respond to local competition for students by differentiating their programmatic offerings from their competitors. However, when the level of competition is minimum or extreme, universities tend to follow an isomorphic strategy. After the reduction in student demand and the reform of the higher education system in 2008/2009, the relationship was no longer curvilinear because universities operating in extremely competitive environments began to adopt more risk-taking behaviour by engaging in diversification strategies.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the propensity of university students to use different sustainable transport modes, taking into account individual and specific trip characteristics, as well as students' psychological traits (i.e. attitudes). Design/methodology/approach: Using the transport mode preferences of 827 students who responded to a travel survey, a two-step analysis is conducted. The first step examines the effects of individual characteristics, travel experience and origin or destination features on students' stated preferences (i.e. self-selected values assigned to personal attitudes). The second step analyses students' travel mode choices, given their intrinsic mobility attitudes. Findings: The results suggest that informing students about environmental issues increases their propensity to use sustainable mobility, leading to an average decrease in private transport usage of 5.8 per cent. Interestingly, improving the public transport service and promoting sustainable transport mobility have different impacts on individual campus areas. For campuses located in the city centre and in the historical hamlet, improvements in public transport are found to decrease solo driving by 3.3 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively. In suburban areas, this value increases to 9.5 per cent. Originality/value: This work makes two contributions to the literature. First, it focuses on an unexplored setting, namely, that of a multi-campus university, with districts located in three different areas. This is used to explain how students are influenced by their travel experience and the cultural framework in which they are embedded. Second, the two-step analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the differences between attitudes and "intrinsic attitudes", and their relative influence on the preferred alternative.

This study analyses the university choices of male and female students in Italy over the 2003-2012 period and for two sub-periods before (2003-2008) and after (2009-2012) the 2008 financial crisis. The analysis is guided by human capital, signalling and preference theories and implemented through a competing destinations model that controls for the socio-economic features of both the region of origin and destination. The findings show that in the post-crisis period, males became more career-oriented in their university choices due to increasingly constrained and competitive labour markets. The constrained post-crisis labour markets led females to focus more on the educational experience than on future employability prospects. Our results suggest that the financial crisis maintained or even widened gendered social roles as they relate to university choices; specifically, males assumed an even greater career-centred family role, whereas females adopted more adaptive lifestyles that potentially place them at a disadvantage in the labour market and in society in years to come.

Italy is among the few countries where open-access rail competition exists, and the entry of the newcomer NTV during 2012 radically changed the market conditions. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the effect of competition on price strategies. To do that, we focused on the period before and after the opening of a new HS direct service between Milano and Ancona. Through a web crawler, we collected available fares, from 30 to 1 days in advance of departure and for 15 months, between September 2013 and December 2014. We statistically analysed the sample i) to estimate the price reactions of the incumbent after the new entry, and ii) to compare the price strategies of the two operators. Results show that the incumbent reduced economy class prices by about 15%. The newcomer is slightly cheaper for bookings well in advance of the departure date, but raises prices in the very last days before departure. Their fare strategy also changed after three months of operations, when they applied lower prices. Finally, we see that Trenitalia does not respond to NTV's prices, whereas the opposite is true, demonstrating that the newcomer is the price-taker in the short-run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]