In this paper sport data are used to study the effects of manager replacement on firm performance. Using match results of the major Italian soccer league (“Serie A”) we analyze the effects of coach (manager) changes in terms of team performance. From our preliminary estimates, including year...

In this paper we examine the signalling value for skills of different examination systems in relation to errors that may affect grades obtained by students. Firm use school grades as a signal of the effective skills of workers, taking into account that evaluation are effected by stochastic...

We analyse peer effects among students of a middle-sized Italian public university. We explain students’ average grade in exams passed during their Second Level Degree course on the basis of their pre-determined measures of abilities, personal characteristics and peer group abilities. Thanks...

In this paper we investigate the effects of class size on the achievements of a sample of college students enrolled at a middle-sized Italian public university. To estimate the effects of class size we exploit the exogenous variations in class size determined by a maximum class size rule...

By casual empiricism, it seems that many firms take explicit account of the family ties connecting workers, often hiring individuals belonging to the same family or passing jobs on from parents to their children. This paper makes an attempt to explain this behaviour by introducing the assumption...

In 1990 a reform in Italy has modified the employment protection legislation for employees of small firms (with fewer than 16 employees) making much more costly for firms to dismiss workers, while leaving unchanged the employment protection in large firms. Using a sample of administrative data...

Many incentive contracts are based on subjective evaluations and contractual disputes depend on judges’ decisions. However, subjective evaluations raise risks of favouritism and distortions. Sport contests are a fruitful field for testing empirically theories of incentives. In this paper the...

When Court enforcement is excessively difficult or costly, agents are often able to create «endogenous enforcement mechanisms», that is, to design agreements so that each party finds it optimal to carry them out (self-enforcing implicit contracts), thanks to the threat of sanctions affecting...

A large body of literature considers the advantages of using informal networks to match workers to jobs. However, family ties may interfere with a genuine process of worker selection, favoring people with connections over more talented workers. We offer a simple model of favoritism to explain...

Abstract: Using a panel data model to control for differences in regional technological levels and to take into account endogeneity, we find two key results for the growth of Italian regions. Firstly, we show that the rate of conditional convergence of each region is much higher (from 12% to 18%...