Increasing access to education may have consequences that go beyond effects on marginal students encouraged to enroll. It may change peer effects, school quality, and returns to skill. This paper studies how classmates and teaching inputs affect learning of university students, exploiting an educational expansion in Italian STEM majors. Newly collected data on 27,236 students indicate that less prepared classmates and congestion of teaching resources lowered learning of incumbent students in STEM fields. Their learning, however, increased in courses in which the new classmates raised average preparedness. These effects might have had long-lasting consequences on the returns to STEM degrees.

This paper examines the long-term and spillover effects of management interventions on firm performance. Under the Training Within Industry (TWI) program, the U.S. government provided management training to firms involved in war production between 1940 and 1945. Using a newly collected panel dataset on all 11,575 U.S. firms that applied to the program, we find that the TWI training had positive and long-lasting effects on firm performance and the adoption of beneficial managerial practices. Moreover, it generated complementarities among different types of training and had positive spillover effects on the supply chain of trained firms.

A poor risk culture was one of the causes of the financial crisis. Surprisingly, there is no evidence of the link between risk culture and bank stability. Using a large sample of European banks from 2004 to 2017, our paper shows that a sound risk culture leads to better performance. Our research design is based on three steps. First, we developed a new Sound Risk Culture Indicator based on the Financial Stability Board (2014) risk culture framework. Second, we estimated this new metric by applying Quantitative Text Analysis. Third, we used an IV 2SLS panel data approach to establish a causal link between bank risk culture and profitability.

This article studies career spillovers across workers, which arise in firms with limited promotion opportunities. We exploit a 2011 Italian pension reform that unexpectedly tightened eligibility criteria for the public pension, leading to sudden, substantial, and heterogeneous retirement delays. Using administrative data on Italian private-sector workers, the analysis leverages cross-firm variation to isolate the effect of retirement delays among soon-to-retire workers on the wage growth and promotions of their colleagues. We find evidence of spillover patterns consistent with older workers blocking the careers of their younger colleagues, but only in firms with limited promotion opportunities.