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- Predictive analysis is proving increasingly important to applied social research carried out for the public, private and mixed sectors. Though asserting its pragmatic value as an assessment and planning tool, however, predictive analysis provides little critical access with regard to its techniques, its finalising capacity and the validity and reliability of its research results. This short paper attempts to provide a posteriori evaluation of about ten Delphi projects carried out between 2002 and 2006, focusing on a time-frame now partially elapsed.

Some individual funding schemes aim at recognizing excellence of early and/or mid-career researchers, allowing them to boost their potential via munificent endowments, autonomy, and employment security. In Italy, this is the case of "Futuro in Ricerca" (FIRB), which is in many regards similar to the European Research Council (ERC) scheme. Both schemes are supposed to make excellence thrive, which is understood also in terms of publishing in leading journals and establishing international collaborations. The paper checks whether FIRB recipients are thereafter more performative in terms of quality of publication (ranking of target journals and international co-authorships), testing against a randomly extracted control group of Italian academics of similar age, rank and discipline. The study tests also against ERC recipients active in Italy. Results of difference-in-difference tests show that i) FIRB recipients improve their capacity to publish in highly ranked journals, similarly to what ERC recipients do; ii) these schemes do not incentivize international co-authorships; iii) FIRB is not conducive of notable changes within non-bibliometric disciplines.

Purpose
This paper aims to study vertical gender segregation, which persists even in the fields where women are represented at junior levels. Academia is an example. Individual performance and lack of a critical mass do not fully explain the problem. Thus, this paper adopted an intergroup perspective (i.e. social identity and competition theories) to study how a majority (i.e. men) can influence the advancement of a minority (i.e. women).


Design/methodology/approach
The paper investigated promotions from associate to full professor in Italy. The original data set included all promotions from 2013 to 2016. To study intergroup dynamics, individual-level variables were analysed together with structural factors, such as gender representation and availability of resources.


Findings
The effect of gender representation was significant in that promotions were more likely when full professor ranks within academic institutions were men-dominated and associate professor ranks were women-dominated. Concurrently, the analysis of individual-level variables supported the existence of discrimination against women. The paper argues that the majority grants more promotions under the pressure of change; however, this does not contrast with discrimination at the individual level.


Research limitations/implications
The paper focused only on one country. However, the framework can be applied in other contexts and used to study segregation based on factors other than gender.


Originality/value
This study explored gender segregation from a new perspective, highlighting the importance of the interplay between individual and structural factors. This interplay might be one of the causes of the slow progress of gender equality.

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This paper examines whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies—the 'Young Thousand Talents' policy (Y1000T)—had, in the following years after recruitment, better research performance. We compare these recipients against other Chinese nationals who got PhDs in equally prestigious non-Chinese universities but continued to work abroad (mostly in the USA). Results of difference-in-differences regressions show that returning to China has an effect of positioning returnees both at the bottom and at the very summit of the distribution of quality of publications. Nevertheless, some Y1000T researchers seem to have prioritized the quantity of outputs, arguably to the detriment of quality. This is probably due to certain research evaluation criteria in place until recent times.