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This paper provides novel evidence on the role of gender in the performance of university students, which is particularly relevant to the debate on the performance of female students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

Our approach relies on the metafrontier approach proposed by Huang et al. (2014), which measures students' efficiency within a given faculty and the impact of the faculty’s technology on students’ efficiency. We use a sample of 53,159 first-year students in 8 faculties from a large university in southern Italy from 2002–2003 to 2010–2011.

Students’ efficiency is relatively low, reflecting an essential role of unobserved heterogeneity. The different technologies of somewhat similar faculties have minimal impact on efficiency. There is a performance gap against women in five faculties, which on average is strongest for the faculties in the pure and applied science area. This gap increases with the proportion of female students and decreases with female lecturers.

The metafrontier has the benefit of providing relevant policy information on the drivers of student success by relying on data that universities routinely generate and preserve.

The stochastic metafrontier approach allows us to separate the group-specific frontiers from the metafrontier, yielding a decomposition of the efficiency scores of various faculties into technical efficiency scores and technological gaps.

The study seeks to shed light on the estimates of the carbon shadow price in the literature relying on frontier techniques. The shadow price of undesirable outputs, such as greenhouse gas emissions, assists policymakers in determining the most cost-effective methods for reducing emissions.

The study relies on the PSALSAR and PRISMA approaches for a systematic literature review. The Web of Science and Scopus databases were used for the references.

Both parametric and nonparametric methods have been employed in the literature to estimate the shadow prices of undesirable outputs. Also, results were discussed according to the methodological and application aspects, and broad conclusions on obtained results were provided, bridging climate change mitigation policies and the shadow price of undesirable outputs.

The present study applies an integrated method, PSALSAR, to conduct a systematic review of 53 studies published between 2014 and 2023 in which efficiency models were applied to estimate the shadow price of undesirable outputs, especially CO₂. After presenting the most applicable parametric and nonparametric estimation models, a systematic summary of included articles was provided, highlighting the key features of publications.