Lorenzo Pandolfi (University of Naples Federico II)

joint with M. Nieddu

We investigate how promotion incentives affect the productivity of a large sample of highskilled public employees: academics. In a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design, we exploit the three bibliometric thresholds of the 2012 National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the centralized evaluation procedure regulating career advancements in Italian universities. We compare the 2013-2016 research productivity of assistant professors barely qualified for associate professor – whose next goal becomes meeting the higher thresholds for the full professor qualification – with the productivity of candidates who barely miss the qualification – whose goal remains meeting the associate professor thresholds. We find that barely qualified scholars publish significantly more papers than their non-qualified colleagues, in journals of comparable quality. Our results emphasize the importance of promotion incentives as an effective incentivizing tool in the hands of public management.

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