In recent years, governments and other stakeholders have increasingly used administrative data for measuring healthcare outcomes and building rankings of health care providers. However, the accuracy of such data sources has often been questioned. Starting in 2002, the Lombardy (Italy) regional...

In this paper we analyze the effects of some distortions induced by the prospective payment system, i.e. upcoding, cream skimming and readmissions, on hospitals' technical efficiency. We estimate a production function using a population-based dataset composed by all active hospitals in an...

Policy makers have made several attempts to limit hospitals upcoding. We investigate the impact on discharges with and without complications of a law introducing a minimum length of stay to discharges with complications. We implement a DID econometric model to assess the impact of the law and a...

This paper investigates the efficiency of Italian hospitals during the period 1998–2007 and consider the impact of some DRG distortions like uocoding, cream skimming and readmission. We apply both a stochastic frontier approach and a multilevel model. We show that readmissions are the most...

We study the presence and the magnitudes of trade-offs between health outcomes and hospitals' efficiency using a data set from Lombardy, Italy, for the period 2008–2011. Our goal is to analyze whether the pressures for cost containment may affect hospital performance in terms of population...

This paper empirically examines to what extent political factors explain different performances in income redistribution in countries that vary in terms of size of the public sector, tax systems, political institutions and governance. In line with the theory, we use the difference in the ex ante...

C<sc>olombo</sc> L. V. A. and T<sc>urati</sc> G. Why do acquiring banks in mergers concentrate in well-developed areas? Regional development and mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in banking, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. The paper focuses on all mergers and acquisitions (M&As) transactions of regional relevance that occurred...

In order to analyze the determinants of tax evasion, the existing literature on individual tax compliance typically takes a ‘prior-to-audit’ point of view. This paper focuses on a ‘post-audit, post-detection’—so far unexplored—framework, by investigating what happens after tax...

We investigate the impact of competing information on the consumer’s evaluation of food products containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We provide three main results. First, we show that introducing mandatory labels to identify whether or not a food product contains GMOs...