To whom it may concern : the value of auditing grade assessment on educational and labour market outcomes

In this paper, we assess the value of auditing the final high school grades on educational and labour market outcomes. We leverage a 2007 reform in Italy that introduced the presence of external examiners on the board. We compare treated and untreated cohorts in a two-way fixed effects model to show that the reform increased the earnings of high school graduates. We carry out two-way fixed effects and special regressor methods to prove that the reform raised the pupils’ years of schooling. We extend the combined fixed effects approach (Altonji and Zhong 2021) to attest that treated cohorts’ returns to graduation are about six percentage points as high as the untreated ones. Women benefited more than men from the reform. The reform led them to choose a different higher education path and opened up the doors to occupations and earnings they would not have earned absent it.