Over the last decades spatial econometrics models have represented a common tool for measuring spillover effects across different geographical entities (counties, provinces, regions or nations). Unfortunately, no one has considered that when these entities share common borders but obey to...

The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

This paper describes sfcross and sfpanel, two new Stata commands for the estimation of cross-sectional and panel data stochastic frontier models. sfcross extends the official frontier capabilities by including additional models (Greene 2003; Wang 2002) and command functionality, such as the...

Understanding the role of drug adherence in everyday clinical practice is central for the policy maker agenda. Despite researchers have investigated this issue at length, uncertainty remains about the true contribution of drug adherence in enhancing therapy effectiveness. In this paper, we aim...

The classic stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism to disentangle individual time invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a,b) proposed a fixed-effects model specification that distinguishes these two latent components and allows a time varying...

In this paper we empirically study the relationship between education attainment and Body Mass Index (BMI), using as theoretical reference an energy balance model. Our data consist of individual level data from eight waves of the Italian survey on life-styles. We use Quantile Regression (QR)...

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: Minimum Efficacy Standards (MES) and Price Controls (PC). We develop a model of adverse selection where a...

We examine access to general practitioners, public and private specialists in Italy. We develop a novel model using finite mixtures of probit models that provides a rich and flexible functional form. The mixed distribution is flexible and can accommodate non-normality of response probabilities....

The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences i) have changed across the years, and ii) can be related to specific sociodemographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of...

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of technology shocks as source of the business cycle in two ways. First, we document that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60’s, which is likely due to a major change in the...