The Effectiveness of Promotion Incentives for Public Employees: Evidence from Italian Academia

This paper investigates how promotion incentives affect the productivity of high-skilled public employees. In a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we exploit the three bibliometric thresholds of the 2012 National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the centralized evaluation procedure awarding the eligibility for career advancements in Italian universities. Specifically, we compare the 2013-2016 research productivity of assistant professors who barely achieve the qualification for associate professor with the productivity of candidates who barely miss it. The former have the incentive to enrich their publication records in order to meet the higher requirements for the full professor qualification by the following round of the NSQ. Conversely, the latter first need to re-apply for the associate professor qualification, thus facing lower promotion thresholds. We find that barely qualified scholars publish significantly more papers – and in journals of comparable quality – than their unsuccessful colleagues. The relationship between the increase in publications and the distance from the expected thresholds for the full professor qualification is inverted-U shaped: promotion incentives are mostly effective when the promotion threshold is neither too difficult nor too easy to meet. Our results emphasize the importance of promotion incentives as an effective tool for public management to enhance the productivity of state personnel. They also provide novel evidence on the responsiveness of scholars to publication-based hiring and promotion schemes.