We evaluate the effectiveness of monetary incentives in enhancing student performance using a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at a southern Italian University. Students were assigned to three different groups: a high-reward group, a low-reward group, and a control...

We conducted a field experiment involving 720 Italian undergraduate students to investigate the existence of gender differences in performance in competitive settings and whether performance is affected by one's opponent gender. The experimental design was aimed at disentangling gender...

We investigate whether overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and whether the effect is heterogeneous according to gender. With this aim, we run a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students. According to widespread superstitions, some numbers are considered lucky while...

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

Some recent theories of human capital investments show that firms could be interested in paying for the general training of their workers. However, when search costs are low because there is a large availability of skilled workers on the market (that is, when the skilled unemployment/vacancy...

We investigate whether Italian regions have converged in terms of output per worker because of physical capital accumulation, human capital accumulation or thanks to technological catch-up. In order to identify channels of convergence we adopt the methodology recently proposed by Wong (2007) and...

The delegation of tasks to a subordinate and his access to key firm resources allow an organization to make optimal use of his knowledge and ability, but at the same time, thanks to on-the-job learning and the possibility of expropriation of these resources, this might increase the agent's...

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...

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