Purpose Youth unemployment is one of the major problems that the economic systems face. Given this issue, the purpose of this paper is to assess whether school-to-work transition is easier for individuals with secondary vocational education compared to general secondary education. The authors want to explore which vocational systems across Europe produce better effects. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from a module on “Entry of young people into the labour market” from the 2009 and 2014 European Labour Survey and they estimate multinomial probit models, allowing for violation of the irrelevance of the alternative assumption. Findings The authors find that in countries with the dual vocational system, vocational education improves employability both in the short and medium run, whereas in countries with a school-based vocational system, results are mixed and, only in some cases, the effect of vocational studies is significantly positive. Research limitations/implications Sample size for short-run analysis is a bit small in a few countries (Austria and Germany). Moreover, even if the authors have reason to believe that the methods adopted are mitigating the omitted heterogeneity issues and robustness checks are run on these aspects, these issues cannot be fully excluded. Practical implications The authors provide policy implications, showing that dual vocational systems can improve school-to-work transitions and that vocational structure is particularly effective in this case. Social implications The authors provide information on which education model may offer better chance in terms of labour outcomes. Originality/value Given the relevance of youth unemployment, the authors provide valuable information on how to mitigate this problem. The use of cross-country comparisons offers great insights on which vocational systems appear to be well-suited to enhance employability.

The issue of Student Evaluation of Teaching has been explored by a large literature across many decades. However, the role of social influence factors in determining teachers’ responses to a given incentive and evaluation framework has been left basically unexplored. This paper makes a first attempt in this vein by considering an evolutionary game-theoretic context where teachers face a two-stage process in which their rating depends on both students’ evaluation of their course and on retrospective students’ evaluation of their teaching output in view of students’ performance in a related follow-up course. We find that both high effort (difficult course offered) and low effort (easy course offered) outcomes may emerge, leading either to a socially optimal outcome for teachers or not, according to cases. Moreover, there may be a potential conflict between the optimal outcome for students and for teachers. We also consider possible ways to generalize our model in future research.

The existing literature identifies different indicators to construct organized crime indices and places equal importance to different concepts of organized crime. This paper examines the sensitivity of organized crime across Italian provinces when different set of indicators and weights are used to combine crime indicators. Our findings suggest that there is a remarkable variation in the distribution of organized crime across Italian provinces based on the choice of indicators and the importance given to different crime indicators. It is also found that the relationship of organized crime with socioeconomic and political factors varies depending on the normative choices made in the construction of an organized crime index.

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This paper examines the growth rate volatility of European regions’ per capita GDP from 1992 to 2008. We measure the regional volatility using a new methodology based on Markov matrices, and investigate its main determinants. Volatility displays a geographical pattern and a significant spatial dependence. Output composition appears one of the main drivers of volatility; among the other determinants we find a negative impact of the size of regional economies and of labour market flexibility, and a positive impact of sectoral concentration, financialization of the economy, and, occasionally, of participation in EMU