Andrea Tesei discussion of: Career incentives in academia
讨论Pandolfi和Nieddu的研究，该研究利用意大利2012年学术晋升改革，识别晋升激励对高技能公共部门员工（学术研究者）生产力的影响。
Increasing workers’ productivity in the public sector is notoriously difficult, largely due to the limited set of incentive-compatible contracts that the state can offer its employees (Finan et al., 2015). Pay-for-performance incentives, which are so common in the private sector, are rarely used in the public sector, both due to its centralized payment structure and the lack of clarity about their social desirability. In most cases, the only motivational leverage available to public organizations is through promotion-based incentives. Despite the prevalence of promotion-based incentive schemes in the public sector, there is limited empirical evidence of their effect on workers’ productivity. The paper by Pandolfi and Nieddu tries to fill this gap, by focusing on one specific category of high-skilled public sector employees: academic researchers. The authors investigate the question in the context of Italy, which represents a suitable setting for several reasons. First, Italian academics represent a non-negligible share of the country’s total public sector workforce, around 2% as of 2017 (MIUR, 2020). Second, the sector has been traditionally characterized by large pockets of inefficiency (Durante et al., 2011). Third, in 2012, the country undertook a major reform of the evaluation system for academic progression, which allows for a clean identification of the role of promotion-based incentives on productivity.