The effect of being awardees for academic careers. ERC and FIRB recipients' outcomes compared to ordinary academics – performances and promotions

Some individual funding schemes aim at recognize excellence of early and/or mid-career researchers in order to allow them boost their potential. Some schemes are munificent endowments, assuring autonomy and security. This is the case of one of the European flagship schemes – the European Research Council (ERC). In Italy, a very similar scheme called FIRB has a similar rationale. Both schemes are supposed to make excellence “fly higher”. The paper checks whether such ERC and FIRB recipients are thereafter more productive in terms of quality and influence testing against a control group of Italian academics of similar age, rank and discipline who did not win such individual grants. Results show that ERC recipients ameliorate research performance more than FIRB recipients did, although differences with control group don’t show always a particular additional effect in research outputs when comparing with pre-awarding performances (difference-in-difference tests). On the other hand, we find a strong Matthew effect in promotions, being the credential of having recipient of an ERC or a FIRB per se the strongest predictor of promotion, other achievements being equal. Policy recommendations speculate whether an egalitarian non-stratified higher education system like the Italian one is ideal home for these schemes, and whether the Italian system can afford a national scheme overlapping international ones, considering long-lasting shortage of financial resources and the egalitarian structure of its system

The gender promotion gap in Italy

The topic of gender differences and career progression is high not only on the scholarly agenda, it is often discussed in the media as well – sometimes in quite controversial terms. We investigate this theme in Italy, a country that in recent years introduced a level of institutional autonomy in determining the career paths of academics. We provide analysis of census data about promotion to full professorship, looking at indicators of productivity, rank, age and prestige of an individual’s department of affiliation. Our analysis also takes into account institutional performative indicators, which affect promotion probabilities. Our study (Marini & Meschitti 2018) found that when promotion decisions lacked transparency a strong discrimination existed against women, despite their productivity matching that of their male counterparts. However, gender discrimination was almost absent when fully transparent procedures were adopted. The seminar will also look at whether this discrimination can be explained by similarities in professors’ communities (those in charge of bestowing promotions), considering specifically the combination of discipline and institution