Where Do I Stand? Assessing Researchers' Beliefs about Their Relative Productivity

Marco Bertoni, Giorgio Brunello, Daniele Checchi and Lorenzo Rocco

No 13637, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In 2017 the Italian government established the Fund to Finance Basic Research Activities – FFABR – with the purpose of assigning a 3,000 euros research grant to the most productive applicants among eligible assistant and associate professors. We show that, rather surprisingly, many low-productivity researchers applied to the program while many high-productivity ones did not. Our evidence from both a simple structural model of program participation estimated on registry data and a survey of the eligible population suggests that high-productivity researchers under-estimate their own position in the productivity distribution relative to the assignment threshold, while the opposite holds for low-productivity ones.

Keywords: overconfidence; competitive research funds; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published as 'Where do I stand? Assessing researchers' beliefs about their productivity' in: Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, 2021, 185, 61-80

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13637.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13637

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().