An atlas of educational inequality in Italy: outcomes, disparities and opportunities

Paolo Brunori, Emanuele Fedeli and Moris Triventi

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We present an in-depth analysis of educational inequality in Italy, focusing on disparities in educational outcomes and opportunities across different socio-economic, gender, and migration backgrounds. Leveraging administrative longitudinal data, we construct a dataset of 386 small geographical areas with a sufficient sample size to assess the extent to which key ascriptive characteristics predict the mathematical achievement of Italian students in the 5th grade of primary school. Our findings highlight a substantial influence of ascriptive characteristics on students’ educational attainment, able to correctly predict out-of-sample up to 20% of the variability despite the relatively small sample size. We show significant geographical variation that previous studies, based on larger geographical aggregations, were unable to observe comprehensively. Additionally, we identify a weak yet negative trade-off between equality and average attainment, which is more pronounced in southern areas, where higher achievement is associated with greater variance and a stronger influence of ascriptive characteristics. Among the predictors, we find that mother’s education plays a predominant role in most of the country.

Keywords: mathematics; opportunity; education; inequality; machine learning; INVALSI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2026-01-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Social Indicators Research, 31, January, 2026, 181(2). ISSN: 0303-8300

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/131065/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:131065

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().