Daniele Checchi

We examine whether more schooling causally increases the cognitive skills of adults. Using education reforms in twenty-one European countries as natural experiments, we link cohorts’ exposure to reforms to internationally comparable numeracy and literacy scores from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development–Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. An extra year of schooling increases adult skills by about 0.2–0.25 standard deviations. The gains are non-linear: completing high school and, especially, college delivers larger skill improvements than the average additional year. Across reform types, expansions of pre-primary and secondary education generate the largest increases in skills. Using information on how individuals use skills at work and at home, we provide evidence consistent with a mechanism whereby education improves access to skill-intensive jobs that sustain and further develop skills over the life cycle. Overall, raising educational attainment can deliver lasting skill gains, particularly when followed by opportunities to use and build skills in the labour market.

This chapter explores how genetic influences on educational attainment vary across institutional contexts, focusing on gene-environment (G×E) and heritability-environment (H×E) interactions. While genetics plays a significant role in shaping behaviour, its effects are moderated by social and policy environments. Using twin data from the Italian Twin Register and administrative records, we estimate ACE variance decomposition models to examine changes in heritability following the Bologna Process. We find that the reform reduced the influence of shared environmental factors while increasing heritability, suggesting that, within this institutional context, outcomes became relatively more dependent on individual-specific factors – both genetic and idiosyncratic – rather than family background. While informative, this approach rests on strong assumptions, which should be kept in mind when interpreting heritability estimates. We argue that a fuller understanding of policy impact requires moving beyond genetic moderation to consider the endogenous and politically contingent nature of educational interventions.

We consider the contribution of the intensive margin of labor supply (hours worked above zero) to the gender wage gap across four economies (Germany, France, US, UK) over a long time-horizon. We first build a model in which firms offer two wage contracts – one that pays a fixed wage but allows workers to choose their preferred number of hours up to “full time”, and a second in which wages are relative to imperfectly observable productivity but hours can be limitless. The former includes part- and full-time work, while the latter represents a class of workers who often must supply very long hours but who can then earn potentially unlimited remuneration. We then apply a Oaxaca decomposition for part-, full-, and over-time workers to observe the relative contribution of sorting and remuneration across these hours “regimes” over time and across countries. Through this, we show that while female employment in over-time work increased and the gender wage decreased, this was not driven by increasing selection but rather by a decrease in the unexplained portion of the wage gap over time. We conclude by considering the contribution of unions and labor market flexibility to these cross-country differences.

We quantify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills across 21 countries and the full distribution of working-age individuals. We exploit exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by a broad set of institutional reforms affecting different cohorts of individuals in different countries. We find a positive effect of an additional year of schooling on internationally-comparable numeracy and literacy scores. We show that the effect is substantially homogeneous by gender and socio-economic background and that it is larger for individuals completing a formal qualification rather than dropping out. Results suggest that early and late school years are the most decisive for cognitive skill development. Exploiting unique survey data on the use of skills, we find suggestive evidence that our result is mediated by access to high-skill jobs.

We quantify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills across 21 countries and the full distribution of working-age individuals. We exploit exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by a broad set of institutional reforms affecting different cohorts of individuals in different countries. We find a positive effect of an additional year of schooling on internationally-comparable numeracy and literacy scores. We show that the effect is substantially homogeneous by gender and socio-economic background and that it is larger for individuals completing a formal qualification rather than dropping out. Results suggest that early and late school years are the most decisive for cognitive skill development. Exploiting unique survey data on the use of skills, we find suggestive evidence that our result is mediated by access to high-skill jobs.

Universities are showing increasing interest in measuring research quality, teaching quality and the relationship between them. Research quality affects individual academic careers and has become important for the efficient allocation of public funding which in many countries and especially countries in Europe is the main component of university financial resources. Teaching quality affects students’ careers, and higher quality teaching can reduce dropout rates, improve student performance, and facilitate graduates’ transition to the labor market. The quality of the research and teaching in universities has mutual effects, since good quality and effective teaching is often related to good research performance. Mobility can emphasize these dynamics; the best students and the best teachers may be concentrated in a few universities creating potential quality gaps among public universities.

While a PhD degree is often considered the first necessary step to an academic career, since 2010 only a small fraction (less than 10%) of doctoral graduates obtained a position in academia within six years of the award of their degree. While we do not have information on their labour market outcomes, we can examine the determinants of this transition in order to study whether entry to an academic job is becoming more difficult. We merge three national administrative data archives covering completed doctoral degrees, postdoc collaborations and new hirings to academia (mostly assistant professor level). We find a decline in appointment probability after 2010, due to the hiring freeze imposed by fiscal austerity. We find, also, that a PhD degree and postdoc experience have a positive effect on the probability of obtaining a position in academia, while being a woman or being a foreign-born candidate has a negative effect. We found no evidence of career disadvantages for candidates from Southern universities.

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.