We show that in competitive careers based on individual performance the least productive individuals may have the highest probabilities to be promoted to top positions. These individuals have the lowest fall-back positions and, hence, the highest incentives to succeed in career contests. This...

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between officeholder and the electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the officeholder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has...

Purpose – Higher education, including research, depends crucially on the people involved, their talents and human capital. Therefore, a university can improve or at least maintain its standing by hiring only the best available academics. Hiring the absolute best may be too expensive for most...

This research examines whether teacher licensure test scores and other teacher qualifications affect high school student achievement. The results are based on longitudinal student-level data from Los Angeles. The achievement analysis uses a value-added approach that adjusts for both student and...

We analyze the career profiles of Italian legislators in the post-war period. Using a unique, newly collected dataset that contains detailed information on all the politicians who have been elected to the Italian Parliament between 1948 and 2008, we address a number of important issues that...

Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the electorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion. We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by...

The European Union was has been bult over more than six decades, during which each and very one of us has continued to build our founding fathers’ European dream, so beautifully summarized by R. Schuman: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built...

Managing dual practice of health workers has often proved to be challenging, especially in emerging countries characterized by weak monitoring and low motivation. This paper exploits an exogenous variation in the initiation of private practice among heads of local public facilities (known as...

Research on the effectiveness of educational inputs, particularly research on teacher effectiveness, typically overlooks teachers’ potential impact on behavioral outcomes such as student attendance. Using longitudinal data on teachers and students in North Carolina I estimate teacher effects...

The present paper provides new causal evidence that private practice of public health professionals may encourage moonlighting with implications for the provision of public health services. Our identification strategy relies on the introduction of the 1997 Ministry of Health Regulation 916 in...