This paper addresses the gender pay gap among Italian university graduates on entry to the labour market and stresses the importance of gender stereotypes on subjective assessment of individual productivity. Our data show that in contexts where the stereotype is most likely to occur, the...

This paper tests whether the academic achievement is a significant determinant of the employment status in the Italian labor market: are the new entrepreneurs selected from the top or bottom end of the graduates ability distribution? Is the cream of the graduate crop pulled into self-employment...

We consider the academic performance of Italian university graduates and their labor market position 3 years after graduation. Our data confirm the common finding that female students outperform male students in academia but are overcome in the labor market. Assuming that academic competition is...

This paper investigates the determinants of credit spread changes in Euro-denominated bonds. Because credit spread changes can be easily viewed as an excess return on corporate bonds over treasury bonds, we adopt a factor model framework, inspired by the credit risk structural approach. We try...

Recently some new techniques have been proposed for the estimation of the slope coefficients in presence of unobserved components. Though, the presence of common observed and unobserved factors is neither considered or the estimation of their impacts is not taken into account. In this work a...