The thesis investigates patterns of administrative and non-instructional spending across Italian public universities, contributing both a new data infrastructure and original empirical evidence to a field that remains substantially understudied in the Italian context.

The first part focuses on the maintenance and updating of a comprehensive dataset of financial statements (bilanci di ateneo) from Italian public universities. Italian universities are required to publish annual financial reports, yet this data remains fragmented across institutional websites and has never been systematically harmonized into a unified, longitudinal research infrastructure. This part of the thesis involves collecting, cleaning, and standardizing balance sheet and expenditure data across institutions and over time, producing a dataset that will be made publicly available to support future research in this area.

The second part leverages this dataset to conduct empirical analyses of resource allocation decisions in Italian higher education. The thesis will examine how spending is distributed across functional areas (including instruction, student services, administration and facilities) and how this distribution varies by institutional size, mission, and geographic location. A particular focus will be placed on how Italian universities respond to periods of fiscal stress, and which expenditure categories are systematically protected or reduced when overall budgets tighten. The analysis will also explore whether governance structures and the degree of administrative centralization are associated with differences in spending intensity across institutions.

This project sits at the intersection of higher education policy, public sector economics, and data infrastructure development.