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...

We exploit a natural experiment based on the Italian promotion system for associate and full professor positions to investigate gender differences in the willingness to enter competition. Using data on about 42,000 professors and controlling for productivity and a number of individual and field...

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...

Standard agency contracts are enforced by means of Courts since it is assumed that the output results on which payments to the agents are conditioned are fully verifiable. This implies that the Court and the Principal have the same information. This is unrealistic in many contexts since...

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...

Relying on a natural experiment consisting in 130 competitions for promotion to associate and full professor in the Italian University, we analyze whether gender discrimination is affected by the gender of evaluators. Taking advantage of the random assignment of evaluators to each competition,...

We evaluate the effects on student achievement of a number of remedial courses provided by an Italian University. To identify the causal effect of remediation we use a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, relying on the fact that students whose performance at a placement test was below a...