Compared with other European countries, the Italian labour market stands out for the low level of both female participation and fertility. In this paper we focus on the employment patterns of Italian mothers around the time of childbirth. Our hypothesis is that the difficulties involved in...

The book brings together a series of research papers presented at the conference entitled "Infrastructure in Italy", held in Perugia on 14-15 October 2010. The papers analyse the relationship between public investment and economic growth; the endowment and quality of infrastructure across the...

In this paper we propose and validate cheating in standardized tests as a new indirect measure of social capital. Given the low-stakes nature of most of the tests examined here, we interpret the widespread presence of cheating as a signal of limited trustin central education authorities....

In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one�s ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes� rule, eventually learning their...

In the last decade, and especially in the course of the recent global economic slowdown, the gap between southern and northern industry has widened. Industrial investment and employment decreased more sharply in the South than in the rest of Italy, and the contribution of the southern regions to...

In this paper we estimate the short-run elasticity of substitution between male and female workers, using data on employment and wages from Italian provinces from 1993-2006. We adopt a production function approach similar to that of Card and Lemieux (2001a) and Acemoglu, Autor and Lyle (2004)....

This paper estimates the impact of university teachers on their students� academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed...

This paper contrasts measures of teacher effectiveness with the students� evaluations of the same teachers using administrative data from Bocconi University (Italy). The effectiveness measures are estimated by comparing the subsequent performance in follow-on coursework of students who are...