Thanks to the effort of two local educational authorities, in two regions of North Italy (Valle d'Aosta and the autonomous province of Trento) the PISA 2009 test was re-administered to the same students one year later. This paper is the first to analyse in the OECD-PISA context the potential...

This article investigates the role of the gender composition of selection committees and the role of connections in promoting women in research activities. Exploiting a newly collected data set on recruitment processes to entry-level research positions in a leading Italian research centre...

This paper determines the ranking of the publications units of assessment which were submitted to the UK research evaluation carried out in 2014, the REF, which would have been obtained if their submission had been evaluated with the bibliometric algorithm used by the Italian evaluation agency,...

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...

The ?prospect of upward mobility? (POUM) hypothesis formalised by Benabou and Ok (2001a) finds explicit assumptions under which some individuals that are poorer than the average optimally choose to oppose redistribution policies. The underlying intuition is that these individuals rationally...

In this paper we analyse the contribution of union activity to reducing earnings inequality. Given the specific nature of the system of industrial relations, Italian unions may contribute to inequality reduction through either national bargaining (i.e. reducing between-sector differentials)...

School vouchers introduced recently in some Italian regions have lowered the cost of private schools. On one side, we provide evidence that Italian private schools may be selected for different reasons than quality considerations. On the other side, by exploiting individual data on voucher...

We examine what determines differences across countries and over time in the distribution of personal incomes in the OECD. We first model the wage determination process and show that unemployment, the labour share, and the wage differential are all functions of labour market institutions. Next...

Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a...

In this paper we provide a new methodology to measure opportunity inequality and to decompose overall inequality in an ethically offensive and an ethically acceptable part. Moreover, we provide some empirical applications of these new evaluation tools: in the first exercise, we compare the...