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 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...

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,...