The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

In 2017 the Italian government established the Fund to Finance Basic Research Activities – FFABR – with the purpose of assigning a 3,000 euros research grant to the most productive applicants among eligible assistant and associate professors. We show that, rather surprisingly, many...

This article investigates the role of the gender composition of selection committees and the role of connections in promoting women in research activities. Exploiting a newly collected data set on recruitment processes to entry-level research positions in a leading Italian research centre...

Using data from three waves of PIRLS, this paper examines the effect of teacher quality on fourth-grade students' literacy test scores by exploiting variations induced by reforms in teachers' selection and/or reward schemes. We construct an original data set of relevant reforms taking place at...

This paper determines the ranking of the publications units of assessment which were submitted to the UK research evaluation carried out in 2014, the REF, which would have been obtained if their submission had been evaluated with the bibliometric algorithm used by the Italian evaluation agency,...

We analyse how schooling in multigrade classes affect the formation of student cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Our identification strategy is based on some institutional features of the Italian educational system establishing a minimum number of students per class. Classes that do not reach...

We study here the problem of evaluating whether the selection from a set is close to the ranking determined by a measurable criterion. We propose a number of natural axioms and show that an index exists that satisfies all these axioms. The paper ends with an application of the index to Italian...

We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multi-unit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion...

In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students' mathematical competencies. Our analysis benefits from a new data set that merges the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with territorial data collected...