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We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduates' work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000 inhabitant-increase in the size of the individual's province of work reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 0.2-0.3 per cent. This result holds after controlling for regional fixed effects and is robust to instrumenting urbanization. Province's competition, urban amenities and dis-amenities, cost of labor, earning differentials between employees and self-employed workers, unemployment rates and value added per capita account for 40 per cent of the negative urbanization penalty. Our result cannot be explained by the presence of negative large-city differentials in returns to education either. In fact, as long as they succeed in entering the largest markets, young entrepreneurs are able to reap-off the benefits of urbanization externalities: every 100,000-inhabitant increase in the province's population raises entrepreneurs' net monthly income by 0.2-0.3 per cent.

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We analyse gender wage inequalities in Italy in the mid-1990s and in the mid-2000s. In this period important labour market developments occurred: institutional changes have loosened the use of flexible and atypical contracts; the female employment rates and educational levels have substantially increased. We identify the time trends of different components of the gender wage gap by estimating wage distributions in the presence of covariates and sample selection and by counterfactual microsimulations. We find that women swam against the tide: whilst the trend in female qualifications slightly reduced the gender wage gap, the gender relative trends in the wage structure significantly increased it.

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The aim of the present paper is to gain some insight into the causes of dropping out of school and, more generally, of the factors that induce parents to review their choices about their child’s schooling careers. To this end we apply to data from a school dropout survey insights from a model of sequential decision making by parents, where the initial decision can be reviewed in the light of new information emerging about the ability and opportunities of the child in benefitting from education relative to her outside (in the unskilled market). Analysis of the data confirms the role of both economic capacity (opportunity costs) and cultural capacity (ability to disentangle signals about future opportunities) of the family of origin shape observed choices about drop-out and return to school by individuals in our sample. Dropping out behaviour also appears to be strongly influenced by mismatches between school and student, however, and many of those who leave are not ‘gone for good’.

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This paper assesses the effect of two stylized and antithetic non-monetary incentive schemes on students' effort. We collect data from a field experiment where incentives are exogenously imposed, performance is monitored and individual characteristics are observed. Students are randomly assigned to a tournament scheme that fosters competition between coupled students, a cooperative scheme that promotes information sharing and collaboration between students and a control treatment in which students can neither compete, nor cooperate. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that competition induces higher effort with respect to cooperation and cooperation does not increase effort with respect to the baseline. However, this is true only for men, while women do not seem to react to non-monetary incentives.

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We consider the effects of the financial crisis and subsequent recession on world labour markets. It begins by cataloguing the adverse effects on output of the sudden collapse in demand brought about by the financial crisis in what has come to be called the Great Recession. Next we look at the labour market and how employment and unemployment have been impacted and document the very different responses by country. We then move on to look at attitudinal indicators of the impact of the rising levels of joblessness we observe across most OECD countries. We examine data on well-being and on attitudes to employment. We also examine a number of questions about the impact of globalization that respondents across many European countries were asked in the spring of 2010. Finally, we examine the policy responses of governments, and consider what lessons might be learned from the marked differences in labour market outcomes following the recession.

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This paper contrasts measures of teacher effectiveness with the students’ evaluations for the same teachers using administrative data from Bocconi University (Italy). The effectiveness measures are estimated by comparing the subsequent performance in follow-on coursework of students who are randomly assigned to teachers in each of their compulsory courses. We find that, even in a setting where the syllabuses are fixed and all teachers in the same course present exactly the same material, teachers still matter substantially. The average difference in subsequent performance between students who were assigned to the best and worst teacher (on the effectiveness scale) is approximately 43 per cent of a standard deviation in the distribution of exam grades, corresponding to about 5.6 per cent of the average grade. Additionally, we find that our measure of teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with the students’ evaluations: in other words, teachers who are associated with better subsequent performance receive worst evaluations from their students. We rationalize these results with a simple model where teachers can either engage in real teaching or in teaching-to-the-test, the former requiring higher students’ effort than the latter. Teaching-to-the-test guarantees high grades in the current course but does not improve future outcomes. Hence, if students are myopic and evaluate better teachers from which they derive higher utility in a static framework, the model is capable of predicting our empirical finding that good teachers receive bad evaluations, especially when teaching-to-the-test is very effective (for example, with multiple choice tests). Consistently with the predictions of the model, we also find that classes in which high skill students are over-represented produce evaluations that are less at odds with estimated teacher effectiveness.

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Italy has an immobile social structure. At the heart of this immobility is the educational system, with its high direct, but especially indirect cost, due to the extremely long time necessary to get a degree and to complete the subsequent school-to-work transition. Such cost prevents the educational system from reallocating the best opportunities to all talented young people and from altering the 'typical' market mechanism of intergenerational transfer of human capital and social status. About 10 years after the Bologna declaration and the '3+2' reform of the university system, AlmaLaurea data relative to 2008 shows a framework not much different from that of 2000. This is apparent by looking at the socio-educational background of university graduates. Parents' educational level seems to be the main determinant of the probability to get a university degree and to get it with the highest possible grade. As previous studies have also shown, the effect of the socio-educational background on children success at the university is not direct, but through the high school track. In fact, although any secondary high school gives access to the university, nonetheless lyceums provide students with far higher quality of education than technical and professional schools.

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We study whether a higher share of immigrant pupils affects the school performance of natives using aggregate multi-country data from [Programme for International Student Assessment] PISA. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship. The size of the estimated effect is small: doubling the share of immigrant pupils in secondary schools from its current sample average of 4.8 per cent to close to 10 per cent would reduce the test score of natives by 1.32 to 1.96 per cent, depending on the selected group of natives. There is also evidence that - conditional on the average share of immigrant pupils - reducing the dispersion of this share between schools has small positive effects on the test scores of natives.

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We use the variation of training policy over time and across Italian regions to identify the relationship between individual training and earnings. Using longitudinal data for the period 1999 to 2005, we find that the marginal effect of one additional week of formal training on monthly earnings is 4.4 per cent. This effect declines rapidly over time and is equal to 0.86 per cent 10 years after the investment. We also find that marginal returns are higher among small firms, which are more likely to be constrained by lack of economic resources in their training decisions. Since small firms train less than large firms, their higher returns from the training induced by training policies can simply reflect decreasing marginal returns to training.

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Over the past two decades there has been a substantial increase in the mobility of students in Europe, while also research has become much more internationally oriented. In this paper we document changes in the structure of research and higher education in Europe and investigate potential explanations for the strong increase in its international orientation. While higher education started to grow substantially around 1960, only a few decades later, research and higher education transformed gradually to the American standard. Decreased communication costs are likely causes for this trend. This transformation is most clearly revealed in the change of language used in research from the national language, Latin, German and French to English. Smaller language areas made this transformation earlier while there are also clear timing differences between research fields. Sciences and medicine tend to switch to English first, followed by economics and social sciences, while for law and arts only the first signs of such a transformation are currently observed. This suggests that returns to scale and the transferability of research results are important influences in the decision to adopt the international standard.

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