In this paper we study the associations between educational policies, distributions of educational attainments and income distributions. By matching inequality measures on test scores, years of education and labour earnings by country, birth cohorts and gender, we show that inequality in...

This paper investigates whether at the interaction between family background and school tracking affects human capital accumulation. Our a priori view is that more tracking should reinforce the role of parental privilege, and thereby reduce equality of opportunity. Compared to the current...

Using data from three waves of PIRLS, this paper examines the effect of teacher quality on fourth-grade students' literacy test scores by exploiting variations induced by reforms in teachers' selection and/or reward schemes. We construct an original data set of relevant reforms taking place at...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which is based on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 previously unemployed persons whose personal...

We provide the first estimates of the impact of managers' risk preferences on their training allocation decisions. Our conceptual framework links managers' risk preferences to firms' training decisions through the bonuses they expect to receive. Risk-averse managers are expected to select...

In this paper we analyse the effects of changes in the institutional design of the educational system on school attainment. In particular, we test whether alternative reforms have increased the average educational attainment of the population and whether various deciles of the education...

In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students' mathematical competencies. Our analysis benefits from a new data set that merges the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with territorial data collected...

We analyse how schooling in multigrade classes affect the formation of student cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Our identification strategy is based on some institutional features of the Italian educational system establishing a minimum number of students per class. Classes that do not reach...