An Empirical Investigation on the Efficiency, Capacity Ownership of Italian Airports

In this paper we study the efficiency of Italian airports applying a DEA model to 34 airports. We find that large airports are more efficient than domestic and regional ones, i.e. small airports have spare capacity since they are more distant from the frontier than large airports. The Tobit regression on the estimated DEA scores shows that efficiency is positively related with the hub premium and with privatisation. Hence we suggest that privatisation incentives to invest in large airports (close to saturation) and development plans to improve the small airports may form the benchmarks of Italian short-run air transportation policy.

Evolution of long distance students' mobility: The role of the air transport service in Italy

Introduction There is a large consensus that the amount of human capital in areas plays a crucial role for regional economic development. Previous evidence on regional economics highlight that a higher concentration of human capital is associated with more population, employment growth, income and ability to innovate (e.g., Carlino et al., 2007; Glaeser and Saiz, 2004; Glaeser, 2005). Therefore, it is crucial to identify the factors that drives differences in human capital accumulation in specific areas (e.g., Boschma at al., 2013). Among others, universities have been identified as focal institutions for the attraction of highly skilled human capital toward specific areas, being firstly responsible for the attractiveness to students from different areas. Although some recent contributions have already investigated whether universities are able to affect the distribution of human capital at a regional level (Ciriaci, 2013; Abel and Deitz, 2012), less attention has been paid to the effects that the evolution of transport infrastructures play in this respect. Due to the growth of interest in the concept and the few attempts to deal with this topic, this paper aims to investigate how the Italian higher education system and transport infrastructures co-evolve over time, mainly focusing on the impact of transports infrastructures? changes on the long distance mobility of students. In the last decade, students aiming to increase their opportunities in the labour market and enhance their social status have become more prone to move, relocating in wealthier areas, whereas, at the same time, long distance students? mobility has been facilitated by the decrease of travel costs (e.g. Ryanair, Freccia Rossa). Data and Methodology Relying on the population of 75 private and public universities in Italy over the period 2002-2012 and the changes that affected both the air transportation and the high-speed rail system we investigate the long distance mobility of first-time first-year university students (more than 300 km from their households) departing from each Italian province. Consistently with the literature on spatial interaction analyses, we investigate the effects of transport infrastructures rely on a competition destinations model (e.g., Sà et al. 2004, Cattaneo et al. 2014). Results Preliminary results suggest that long distance students? mobility has been affected by the evolution of transport infrastructures with an important impact of low cost airlines from Southern to Northern Italian regions. The change in the distribution of Italian students that has been occurred in the last years (Cattaneo et al. 2014; Long 2013) is found to be facilitated by the presence of more developed transport infrastructures, which have decreased the costs associated to long distance mobility

Manage with care: the frailty of self-connections in the European airport network

AbstractThis study evaluates the attractiveness of self-hubbing in terms of the (a) symmetry of itineraries and the consequences for passengers in the case of missed flights. We compute the most attractive European origin-destination (O-D) pairs through self-connection and evaluate their robustness by estimating the expected delays relative to connecting times and the travel options available when a connection is missed.Results show that the potential of self-connecting markets is reduced when accounting for asymmetrical travel options and the consequences for travelers in the case of missed flights. In terms of frequencies, self-connecting passengers are, on average, found to have fewer alternatives to complete a given O-D pair than in the case of alliance-based connections (− 33%). Our findings moderate the confidence of past evidence on self-hubbing in light of the concrete reliability of self-connections for passengers. The itinerary choice made by passengers inevitably depends on the evaluation of travel quality attributes related to the (a) symmetry of the itineraries and the costs incurred through missed connections

Editorial: Special Issue: Safety & Efficiency of Civil Aviation: Selected Papers from the World Conferences of the Air Transport Research Society and the World Conference on Transport Society - 2013

The Air Transport Research Society (ATRS) is a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS). The ATRS annual World Conference was held at the University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy on 26-29 June 2013 and it attracted 266 papers from 37 countries. Also, the WCTRS triennial World Conference was held on 15- 18 July at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during which the ATRS organised several sessions devoted to air transport topics. This special issue of the Journal of Air Transport Studies has drawn upon all of this material to present four papers that promote improvements in the safety and efficiency of civil aviation

Universities’ responses to crises : the influence of competition and reputation on tuition fees

Author's accepted manuscript.Available from 10/11/2021.This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Higher Education. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00622-2.acceptedVersio

Giant g factor tuning of long-lived electron spins in Ge

Control of electron spin coherence via external fields is fundamental in spintronics. Its implementation demands a host material that accommodates the highly desirable but contrasting requirements of spin robustness to relaxation mechanisms and sizeable coupling between spin and orbital motion of charge carriers. Here we focus on Ge, which, by matching those criteria, is rapidly emerging as a prominent candidate for shuttling spin quantum bits in the mature framework of Si electronics. So far, however, the intrinsic spin-dependent phenomena of free electrons in conventional Ge/Si heterojunctions have proved to be elusive because of epitaxy constraints and an unfavourable band alignment. We overcome such fundamental limitations by investigating a two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) confined in quantum wells of pure Ge grown on SiGe-buffered Si substrates. These epitaxial systems demonstrate exceptionally long spin relaxation and coherence times, eventually unveiling the potential of Ge in bridging the gap between spintronic concepts and semiconductor device physics. In particular, by tuning spin-orbit interaction via quantum confinement we demonstrate that the electron Land\'e g factor and its anisotropy can be engineered in our scalable and CMOS-compatible architectures over a range previously inaccessible for Si spintronics

Universities' attractiveness to students: The Darwinism effect

AbstractDue 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

Corrigendum to "Higher Education Policy: Why hope for Quality when rewarding Quantity?" [Research Policy Volume 49, Issue 8(2020) /104083]

n/