Plenary Sessions

Science for Policy in the European Commission: Examples from the field of social sciences.

Sylke V. Schnepf (PhD) is a senior policy advisor in the Science for Modelling, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy. She is part of the Survey Methods and Analysis Centre (SMAC) team conducting research on survey design, fairness and loneliness. She also contributes to the Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation through research, teaching and advisory activities on quantitative education policy evaluation. Before joining the JRC in 2014, she was an associate professor in social statistics at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Dr Schnepf has a long publication record on patterns of cross-national educational inequalities and counterfactual impact evaluation of policies aimed at mitigating these inequalities.

The use of composite indicators in education: A tale of beauty contest and policy making.

Giovanna D’Inverno is Associate Professor in Mathematical Methods for Economics, Actuarial Science and Finance at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Pisa (Italy). She is also Research Associate in the Leuven Economics of Education Research (LEER) center at KU Leuven (Belgium). She has a joint PhD degree (2018) from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy) and KU Leuven (Belgium) and a postdoc at KU Leuven in the Leuven Economics of Education Research (LEER) center. She is the author of several publications in top-ranked journals. Her research focuses on the development of quantitative methods and policy evaluation techniques to address policy-relevant issues, so to complement efficiency with effectiveness analysis in an integrated economic framework. Recurrent empirical applications mostly cover public economic issues and sustainability challenges, with particular attention on local government expenditure, education and water and waste management. She works on several national and international projects, including collaborations with consultancy agencies and policy makers.

Integrating Impact Assessment into Education System Performance Evaluation: Opportunities, Challenges and Applications.

Gabriela Sicilia is an Assistant Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Business at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). Her research focuses on measuring efficiency and productivity, as well as policy evaluation in the education sector. Specifically, she explores how to integrate insights from impact evaluation methods with non-parametric frontier techniques to improve the assessment of teachers, schools, and education systems, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Her work has been published in numerous top-ranked journals, and she is actively involved in several national and international research projects. Outside academia, Gabriela Sicilia has also worked at the Ministry of Economy, the Statistics National Institute and the Ministry of Social Development in Uruguay, and she regularly acts as a consultant to public agencies and international organizations.