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 article examines the long term physical and mental health effects of internal migration. We use data from Italy that allows us to study a relatively unique migration experience from Southern and Northeastern regions of Italy to Northwestern ones and to the region around Rome concentrated...

We study the relationship between gerontocracy and aggregate economic performance in a simple model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation and productive government spending (investments in ICT). We show that gerontocratic élites display the tendency to underinvest in public...

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...

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...

In this work we investigate the causal impact of cost sharing schemes on drug compliance using a Difference-in-Differences approach within a quantile regression framework. We exploit a series of natural experiments occurred in Italy between 2000 and 2010, referring to the introduction of...

This paper aims at evaluating the impact of 1998 Chinese health care reform on out-of-pocket expenditure and on saving. Existing evidence on the results achieved by this reform in terms of reduction of out-of-pocket medical expenditures is still mixed and contradictory, and very little is known...

A large body of literature, mainly based on hospital costs, shows that time to death (TTD) is by far a better predictor of health spending than age. In this paper, we investigate if this finding holds true also in presence of outpatient costs (drugs, diagnostic tests and specialist visits). Our...

Incorporating equity considerations in comparisons of economic policies is always challenging. This paper uses a social welfare function, a la Jorgenson and Slesnick, incorporating both e±ciency and equity to estimate society's preferences toward inequality. The function is based upon a...

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 socio-demographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of...