We use longitudinal data based on administrative archives from 1985 to 2002 to estimate the relationship between wages and firm size for Italy. Controlling for individual fixed effects we find that larger firms pay significantly higher wages, although the individual unmeasured ability component...

Using data from an Italian University we relate student evaluations of teaching quality to physical attractiveness of instructors, controlling for a number of teachers’ and courses’ characteristics. We first show that the beauty of teachers strongly affects teaching evaluations. To...

We carry out a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at an Italian University attending an introductory economics class to evaluate the impact on achievement of examination frequency and interim feedback provision. Students in the treated group were allowed to undertake...

This paper analyses theoretically favouritism in recruitment decisions. We study the investments in connections by applicants for jobs which pay a wage rent and the behaviour of public or private managers intending to favour the recruitment of connected agents in place of more competent...

In Italy, employees are fully insured against earning losses due to illness. Since worker's health is not easily verifiable, absenteeism due to illness is considered an empirical proxy for employee shirking. The Bank of Italy Household Survey (SHIW) provides individual data on days of absence....

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important...

We analyze to what extent physical attractiveness is related to lifetime economic outcomes through the marriage market, investigating whether individual height and weight affect the probability of marrying with a “high quality partner”, measuring quality with the partner’s educational...

We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players’ familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

Skills are important for many social and economic outcomes. Whereas interventions during childhood are considered crucial to increase the skills of disadvantaged individuals, in this paper, we try to understand whether interventions which take place later in life can also be effective. With this...