A growing number of academic studies are devoting their attention to the study of the gender wage gap. This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the existence of this gap specifically among those who hold the highest possible educational qualification, i.e. a PhD. The analysis relies on Italian crosssectional data collected through a highly representative survey of the employment conditions of PhD holders. The econometric analysis is carried out by means of OLS regression, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis and quantile decomposition. Findings suggest that a gender gap in hourly wages exists among PhD holders, that it lies approximately between 5% and 8%, with sizeable differences by sector of employment and field of specialization, and that such a gap is largely unexplained.

Finding a non-academic job in line with both doctoral graduates' degree and acquired know-how can be difficult because of insufficient demand for R&D skills in public administration and private enterprise and/or because of the lack of matching between the existing demand and the Ph.D. holders' specialization. The aim of this paper is to test whether migrating from some regions may improve job-education matching in Italy. The econometric strategy takes into account Ph.D. holders' selfselection into non-academic employment as well as the endogeneity of the migration choice. Results demonstrate that migration seems to facilitate the possibility of finding better job opportunities. More specifically, only migration within the regions of the centre and north of Italy seems to improve jobeducation matching.

The wage effect of overeducation has only recently been investigated in the case of Ph.D. holders. The existing contributions rely on OLS estimates that allow measuring the average effect of being educationally mismatched at the mean of the conditional wage distribution. This paper, instead, observes the heterogeneity of the overeducation penalty along the hourly wage distribution and according to the study field and sector of employment (academic/non-academic) of Ph.D. holders. We estimate a Recentered Influence Function. The results reveal that overeducation hits the wages of those Ph.D. holders who are employed in the academic sector and in non-R&D jobs outside of the academic sector. Instead, no penalty exists among those who carry out R&D outside the Academia. The size of the penalty is higher among those who are in the mid-top of the wage distribution and hold a Social Science and Humanities specialization.

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating the wage penalty of job-education mismatch among Ph.D. holders who completed their studies in Italy; a country where the number of new doctoral recipients has dramatically increased over recent years while personnel employed in R&D activities is still below the European average. We use cross-sectional micro-data collected in 2009 and rely on different definitions of education-job mismatch such as, overeducation, overskilling and dissatisfaction with the use of skills. We find that overeducation and skills dissatisfaction are associated with significantly lower wages but there is no wage penalty from overskilling. Furthermore, those who simultaneously report overeducation and skills dissatisfaction experience a particularly high wage penalty.

Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at modernizing the public administrations of Member States (MSs) have long since been a priority area of the EU's economic policy. Since the 1990s, these reforms have been sharply intensified across European countries with the declared purpose of enhancing economy, efficiency and effectiveness in their national public sectors' organizations. In line with the European Commission's recent research initiatives in search for novel quantitative data on NPM in the EU, this paper studies European parties' NPM reform rhetoric. More specifically, it investigates the MSs' institutional, economic and political context within which parties have declared their intention of reforming national administrative systems. Thus, it sheds light on the MSs' domestic factors that are associated with the diffusion of the NPM values across the political discourse of EU's national parties.

By using data extracted from the political manifestos released by national political parties from 27 European Union countries over the 1990-2012 period, we estimate non-linear econometric models whose aim is to understand the determinants of cross-country political concern for the 'stability culture'. This expression describes an economic policy perspective based on the aims of providing price stability, fiscally disciplined budgets and rules and procedures that favour public expenditure ceilings. Our findings reveal that parties' commitment to the 'stability culture' is determined by their ideological background and by the national macroeconomic situation in the pre-electoral year.

Freedom of Information (FOI) is considered a crown jewel of reforms fostering public administration transparency and accountability. However, FOI's symbolic power alone cannot overcome the organizational barriers and obstacles to its effective implementation. This paper presents the results of a field experiment performed in Italy, a late FOI adopter, where an FOI request was sent to the 307 municipalities with more than 30k inhabitants. The experimental design exploits marginal wording variation in the requests to test whether municipalities discriminate between ordinary citizens and high-profile requesters. The experimental evidence suggests that most Italian municipalities reply to FOI requests. The results show two opposite types of discretionary bias, as Northern municipalities tend to favor high-profile requesters. In contrast, Southern municipalities tend to respond to them with a higher degree of attrition. The study investigates the determinants of this difference.

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating its effects on wages among Ph.D. holders. We analyze data collected in 2009 by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) through a large cross-sectional survey of Ph.D. recipients that allowed us observing their work placement few years after the completion of their studies. We extend previous contributions by providing an analysis based on the identification of genuine overeducation as resulting from the interaction of respondents' assessments that concern the usefulness of their Ph.D. title in order to get and to carry out their current job. The potential endogeneity of self-reported genuine overeducation is corrected by using an instrumental variables approach where the provincial incidence of overeducation among those that share the same educational profile of respondents is used as instrument. Our results suggest that genuine over-education is particularly detrimental for individual wages. It leads to a wage penalty of about between 23% and 25%, more than twice bigger than average, a sizeable gap for the country's compressed wage structure. These results allow us to better understanding the effects of job-education mismatch and provide some useful insights into the evaluation of the career outcomes of doctoral graduates.

This note contributes to the literature on the air pollution consequences determined by hosting mega-events. An econometric analysis is provided to document the increase in air pollution observed in Naples (Italy) during the G20 Ministerial meeting on the Environment, Climate, and Energy carried out in July 2021. Such evidence contributes to understanding the potential costs of mega-events in a metropolitan area with low air quality and high private car density. Findings suggest that mega-events cause a decrease in air quality. Therefore, we suggest to organize mega-event outside cities. The media coverage would not be lowered by this policy, and on the contrary it could be a useful occasion to re-discover inner, less urbanized area.