The authors study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in France, Italy, and Spain. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in mandated gender quotas within country and over time and uses a counterfactual methodology. Using firm-level accounting data and a difference-in-difference estimator, the authors find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of Italy, where they find a positive impact on productivity. The authors then focus on Italy. Using a novel data set containing detailed information on board members’ characteristics, they offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas. The results provide an important contribution to the policy debate about the optimal design of legislation on corporate gender quotas.

We provide evidence on whether ICT-related teaching practices affect student achievement. We use a unique student-teacher dataset containing variables on very specific uses of computer and ICT by teachers matched with data on national standardized tests for 10 th grade students. Our identification strategy relies on a within-student between-subject estimator and on a rich set of teacher's controls. We find that computer-based teaching methods increase student performance if they help the teacher to obtain material to prepare lectures, if they channel the transmission of teaching material, if they increase students' awareness in ICT use and if they enhance communication. Instead, we find a negative impact of practices requiring an active role of the students in classes using ICT. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of ICT at school depends on the actual practice that teachers make of it and on their ability to integrate ICT into the teaching process.

We provide evidence on whether ICT-related teaching practices affect student achievement. We use a unique student-teacher dataset containing variables on very specific uses of computer and ICT by teachers matched with data on national standardized tests for 10 th grade students. Our identification strategy relies on a within-student between-subject estimator and on a rich set of teacher's controls. We find that computer-based teaching methods increase student performance if they help the teacher to obtain material to prepare lectures, if they channel the transmission of teaching material, if they increase students' awareness in ICT use and if they enhance communication. Instead, we find a negative impact of practices requiring an active role of the students in classes using ICT. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of ICT at school depends on the actual practice that teachers make of it and on their ability to integrate ICT into the teaching process.

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We analyse the wage gap between temporary and permanent jobs in nine European countries using a semiparametric approach and evaluate the wage gap across the entire wage distribution. We show that in some countries the fixed-term wage gap decreases as higher quantiles are considered, and that having a fixed-term contract penalizes more workers located at the bottom of the earnings distribution. We find also that workers with the same characteristics as temporary workers would receive higher wages if they worked on permanent contracts in almost all the countries considered, and that this finding is stable across the entire wage distribution.

This paper investigates the impact of Export Promotion Programs (EPPs) in Lombardy -one of the richest region in Italy and one of the four Motors of Europe -on the export performance of beneficiary firms. To assess the impact of the EPPs, we applied a fixed-effect differences-indifferences estimator with ex-ante matching. We shed light on why and how EPPs work by exploring in details what dimensions of export performance respond better to these programs, which support services are more related to export success and which firms benefit more. Our estimates suggest that assisted firms show higher export propensity and export intensity than nonassisted firms, with micro-and small-sized firms and already exporting firms benefiting the most. Last but not least, the effect of EPPs remains positive and significant even when the potential impact of other subsidies is accounted for. These results are useful for improving the design of EPPs.

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