Abstract
Abstract We study career concerns in italian academia. We mold our empirical analysis on the standard model of contests, formalized in the multiunit all-pay auction. The number of posts, the number of applicants, and the relative importance of the criteria for promotion determine academics' effort and output. In Italian universities, incentives operate only through promotion, and all appointment panels are drawn from strictly separated and relatively narrow scientific sectors. Thus, the parameters affecting payoffs can be measured quite precisely, and we take the model to a newly constructed data set that collects the journal publications of all Italian university professors. Our identification strategy is based on a reform introduced in 1999, parts of which affected different academics differently. We find that individual researchers respond to incentives in the manner described by the theoretical model: roughly, more capable researchers respond to increases in the importance of the publications for promotion and in the competitiveness of the scientific sector by exerting more effort; less able researchers are discouraged by competition and do the opposite.
Highlights
Like other economic agents, academics operate under incentives: understanding how they respond to them, beside its independent interest, is indispensable background to any attempt to improve the behaviour and performance of the university sector
We find that individual researchers respond to incentives in the manner described by the theoretical model: roughly, more capable researchers respond to increases in the importance of the publications for promotion and in the competitiveness of the scientific sector by exerting more effort; less able researchers are discouraged by competition and do the opposite
This paper studies the response of Italian academics to changes in competitive conditions
Summary
Academics operate under incentives: understanding how they respond to them, beside its independent interest, is indispensable background to any attempt to improve the behaviour and performance of the university sector. While in practice some individual characteristics may change from period to period as they are influenced by events unfolding in time, one would expect these to remain relative constant across a person’s lifetime, and, encouragingly, we find strong serial correlation in an academic’s individual fixed effects (see the discussion of Figure 5, at the end of Section 6) This is a confirmation of the soundness of our empirical strategy. Our identification strategy hinges on one important detail of the reform of appointments and promotions rules which came into force in 1999, right in the middle of the period we study, namely a blunt cap of five on the number of applications a candidate could make in each year This cap, as we show in Proposition 2, alters two of the parameters affecting the competitive conditions, the number of posts and the number of competitors, for some academics, but not for others, in a way that is likely unrelated to other unobservable characteristics determining their effort.
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