Absenteeism and Peer Interaction Effects: Evidence from an Italian Public Institute

Using microdata on a sample of about 350 workers, employed at an Italian public institute, we explain individual absence rates both considering variables that may be related to health conditions and to variables that may suggest shirking behaviour. Among these variables we especially focus our attention on the influence produced by the behaviour of randomly assigned peers. To handle reflection problems we use the proportion of females in the peer group as instrument of peer absence behaviour. From Two-Stage least square estimates it emerges that social and group interactions play an important role in shaping individual absence behaviour.Absenteeism, Shirking, Peer Effects

Are easy grading practices induced by low demand? Evidence from Italy

In this paper we investigate whether grades are used by educational institutions as a competition variable to attract and retain students. Using a sample of almost 26,000 students enrolled at an Italian University, we document that grades vary significantly across degrees. After controlling for students’ characteristics, class-size, classmates’ quality and degree fixed effects, it emerges that students obtain better grades and are less likely to drop-out when their degree course experiences an excess of supply. We adopt an instrumental variable strategy to account for endogeneity problems and instrument the excess of supply by using the total number of universities offering each degree course. Our IV estimates confirm that the teaching staff on degree course facing low demand tend to set lower academic standards with the result that their students obtain better grades and have a lower probability of dropping out than they might otherwise.grades, higher education, grading standards

Does Teacher Quality Affect Student Performance? Evidence from an Italian University

In this paper we analyse whether the characteristics of university teaching staff matter with regards students’ performance and interest in the discipline. We use data on about one thousand students enrolled on the first level degree course in Business and Economics at a medium sized Italian University. Thanks to the random assignment of students to different teaching sections during their first year, we are able to analyze the effect that teachers with different characteristics, in terms of experience and research productivity, produce both on students’ performance, measured in terms of the grades obtained at subsequent exams and courses chosen. Our results suggest that teacher quality has statistically significant effects on students’ grades on subsequent courses. These effects are also robust after controlling for unobserved individual characteristics. On the other hand, we find less clear evidence when relating teacher quality to student involvement with a subject. It emerges that more experienced teachers have a negative impact on the probability of a student’s undertaking additional courses in a subject, while research productivity does not produce a statistically significant effect.teaching quality, student performance,

Evaluating automatic cross-domain Dutch semantic role annotation

In this paper we present the first corpus where one million Dutch words from a variety of text genres have been annotated with semantic roles. 500K have been completely manually verified and used as training material to automatically label another 500K. All data has been annotated following an adapted version of the PropBank guidelines. The corpus’s rich text type diversity and the availability of manually verified syntactic dependency structures allowed us to experiment with an existing semantic role labeler for Dutch. In order to test the system’s portability across various domains, we experimented with training on individual domains and compared this with training on multiple domains by adding more data. Our results show that training on large data sets is necessary but that including genre-specific training material is also crucial to optimize classification. We observed that a small amount of in-domain training data is already sufficient to improve our semantic role labeler

The Effects of Managerial Turnover: Evidence from Coach Dismissals in Italian Soccer Teams

In this paper sport data are used to study the effects of manager replacement on firm performance. Using match results of the major Italian soccer league (“Serie A”) we analyze the effects of coach (manager) changes in terms of team performance. From our preliminary estimates, including year and team fixed effects, it emerges that changing the coach produces a positive effect on a number of measures of team performance. However, this effect turns out to be statistically insignificant once we take into account the fact that the firing of a coach is not an exogenous event, but it is triggered by a “dip” in team performance. Using as an instrument for coach change the number of remaining matches in the season (which is a proxy for the residual length of the coach contract) Two-Stages Least Squares estimations do not show any significant effect of coach change on team performance.Managerial Turnover, Dismissal; Performance evaluation; Sport economics

The Design of the University System

This paper compares the organisation of the university sector under private provision with the structure which would be chosen by a welfare maximising government. It studies a general equilibrium model where universities carry out research and teach students. To attend university and earn higher incomes in the labour market, students pay a tuition fee. Each university chooses its tuition fee to maximise the amount of resources it can devote to research. Research bestows an externality on society because it increases labour market earnings. Government intervention needs to balance labour market efficiency considerations — which would tend to equalise the number of students attending each university — with considerations of efficiency on the production side, which suggest that the most productive universities should teach more students and carry out more research. We find that government concentrates research more that the private market would, but less than it would like to do if it had perfect information about the productivity of universities. It also allows fewer universities than would operate in a private system.Higher education; The organisation of the university sector.

THE CAUSAL IMPACT OF CLOSENESS ON ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION EXPLOITING THE ITALIAN DUAL BALLOT SYSTEM

Using data from Italian municipal elections from 1993 to 2011, we investigate whether political competition affects electoral turnout. Taking advantage of the dual ballot system adopted for municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, we measure the expected closeness in the second round through the first round electoral results. Thanks to the richness of our dataset we are able to distinguish between valid, blank and invalid ballots and to investigate the effect of closeness on each of these variables, controlling for municipalities’ and candidates’ characteristics and for municipal fixed effects. We also estimate a Heckman selection model to take into account for the non-randomly selected sample. It emerges that closeness strongly increases valid ballots and reduces blank ballots supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in closer competitions. The effect is much higher in magnitude than that merging when measuring closeness with ex-post electoral results, suggesting a quite relevant endogeneity bias. On the other hand, we do not find any statistically significant effect on invalid ballots.Electoral Turnout, Closeness, Electoral Competition, Blank and Invalid Ballots