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...

In this paper, we analyze class size effects on college students exploiting data from a project offering special remedial courses in mathematics and language skills to freshmen enrolled at an Italian medium-sized public university. To estimate the effects of class size, we exploit the fact that...

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to verify the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...

We investigate the role of fatigue in soccer (football). Although this issue is important for the “productivity” of players and the optimal organization of national and international championships, there is a lack of empirical evidence. We use data on all the matches played by national teams...

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to verify the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...

Scoppa V. (2007) Quality of human and physical capital and technological gaps across Italian regions, Regional Studies 41, 585-599. This paper evaluates the relative contribution of factor accumulation and technology in explaining output per worker differences across Italian regions. The...

In this paper, using data from Italian local level governments for the years 1985- 2008, we investigate whether political competition affects the quality of elected politicians, as measured by using some ex-ante characteristics such as educational level and type of job held. We handle...

A large empirical evidence shows that on-the-job training paid by firms is mainly directed towards high educated workers. In order to explain this phenomenon, we propose two simple models adopting the assumption that education has a positive influence on the efficiency with which individuals...

In this paper we investigate whether remedial courses, designed to fill in the gaps in basic skills, bring about any improvement in undergraduate student attainment. Our analysis is based on a project financed by the Regione Calabria, which provided a number of educational/training activities to...

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...