The effectiveness of promotion incentives for public employees: evidence from Italian academia
利用意大利国家科学资格评审的文献计量阈值，通过模糊断点回归设计，发现刚通过副教授资格评审的学者比未通过的同行发表更多论文，表明晋升激励能有效提升公共部门雇员的生产力。
Abstract We investigate how promotion incentives affect the productivity of a large sample of high-skilled 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 2013–16 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 public universities and more in general public organizations.