This paper investigates whether the quality of higher education and, in particular, its research performance stimulate graduates' research-oriented careers. More specifically, exploiting a very rich data-set on university graduates and the higher education institutions they attended, we...

This paper documents that grades vary significantly across Italian public universities and degrees. We provide evidence suggesting that these differences reflect the heterogeneity of grading standards. A straightforward implication of this result is that university funding schemes based on...