This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information.  We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives, but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to...

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of including the value of public health care, longterm care, education and childcare on estimates of income inequality and financial poverty in 23 European countries. The valuation of public services and the identification of target groups rely on...

No abstract.

This paper argues that the ‘New Public Management’ paradigm for public management theory and practice that has prevailed for the last thirty years is both flawed in theory and has failed in practice. We argue for an alternative to this paradigm that is rooted with the New Public Governance...

One of the main motivations for productivity analysis is to assess the scope for overall improvements in the output possibilities of individual producers. At times of fiscal and government budgetary pressures, attention focuses particularly on the output potential of public service providers and...

This paper explores the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of public service delivery. It uses a stochastic frontier method to estimate time-varying efficiency coefficients and analyzes the impact of fiscal decentralization on those efficiency coefficients. The findings indicate...

Public administration and public services, after a slow development and successive layers, from the beginning of the 90s witnessed a significant transformation. The legislation, by choice or necessity,imposed previously unknown areas of competition in the sector. In open markets where entry and...

The paper reviews the main results of a research project on the Mezzogiorno carried out by Bank of Italy in 2008-09 to investigate the chronic relative backwardness of Italy's southern regions. Per capita output in the South is less than 60 per cent of that in the Centre and North; one fifth of...

This study discusses the main problems in assessing overall spending efficiency of local governments and presents an application of non-parametric techniques (DEA) to the activities carried out by Italian municipalities. The analysis relies on a sample of 262 municipalities in the Province of...

At its core, this dissertation examines the role of information, particularly as it relates to proxies for quality, and how it affects both donor and organization decision processes in the humanitarian space. In Chapter 2 I consider the context of competition within the sub-sector of...