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

We analyze to what extent physical attractiveness is related to lifetime economic outcomes through the marriage market, investigating whether individual height and weight affect the probability of marrying with a “high quality partner”, measuring quality with the partner’s educational...

Using data from an Italian University we relate student evaluations of teaching quality to physical attractiveness of instructors, controlling for a number of teachers’ and courses’ characteristics. We first show that the beauty of teachers strongly affects teaching evaluations. To...

We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players’ familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

Using data for 9, 13 and 15-year-old students from three different datasets (PIRLS-2006, TIMSS-2007 and PISA-2009), we investigate whether the age at school entry affects children school performance at the fourth, eighth and tenth grade levels. Since student’s age in a grade may be endogenous,...

This paper analyses theoretically favouritism in recruitment decisions. We study the investments in connections by applicants for jobs which pay a wage rent and the behaviour of public or private managers intending to favour the recruitment of connected agents in place of more competent...

Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We...

In this paper we analyse the effect of gender quotas on women involvement in political activity using a rich data set providing information on all Italian local administrators elected from 1985 to 2007. Gender quotas were introduced in Italy by law in 1993 and were in force until 1995. Because...

In questo lavoro si analizza l’efficacia dei corsi a livello pre-universitari diretti a colmare eventuali lacune nelle competenze di base degli studenti. La nostra analisi riguarda gli effetti prodotti da un progetto che all’inizio dell’anno accademico 2008-09 ha offerto agli studenti...

In this paper we carry out an evaluation of the effectiveness of monetary incentives in enhancing student performance using a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at a Southern Italian University. Students participating at the experiment were assigned to three...