Part I: Introduction and general framework.

Chapter 1: Introduction.

Chapter 2: University assessment as governance device.

Part II: Teaching and students' careers in Italy.

Chapter 3: Do family economic conditions influence play a role in university dropout? New evidence from administrative data.

Chapter 4: Drop-out decisions in a cohort of Italian university students.

Part III: Recruiting and academic careers

Chapter 5: From PhD to Assistant Professor: analysis of recent cohorts.

Chapter 6: Academic Careers and Fertility Decisions.

Part IV: Conformism in research.

Chapter 7: Social Network tools for the evaluation of individual and group scientific performance.

Chapter 8: Topic-Driven Detection and Analysis of Scholarly Data. The Maverick Project.

Part V: Research quality and impact on teaching.

Chapter 9: The relationship between teaching and research: the role of the institutional context and environmental factors.

Chapter 10: Degree-level determinants of university student performance.

Chapter 11: Teaching Efficiency of the Italian Universities: a Conditional Frontier Analysis.