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...

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...

Given the lack of women in academia, several countries have recently adopted gender quotas in hiring and promotion committees. This paper studies whether these policies may work. The identification strategy exploits the random assignment mechanism in place between 2002 and 2006 in all academic...

This paper analyzes empirically whether expansion of a university system affects local industry innovation. We examine how the opening of new university faculties in Italy during 1985-2000 affected regional innovation systems. We find that creation of a new university faculty increased regional...

In this paper we assess the differences between immigrant and native pupils' educational performance in Spain using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that immigrant pupils perform substantially worse than native pupils in all domains analyzed by PISA....

It is well known that incumbent politicians tend to receive more votes when economic conditions are good. In this paper we explore the source of this correlation, exploiting the exceptional evidence provided by the Spanish Christmas Lottery. This is a unique lottery: 75% of Spaniards play,...