In the last few years there has been an increasing public pressure in many countries to contain costs in the healthcare sector, leading many national governments to introduce some form of prospective payment system and to reduce the scope for global budgeting. In this paper we investigate...

The aim of this study is to examine the role of institutional quality and its pillars on the cost efficiency of social services provided by local governments in Italy. To this end, a new advancement of panel cost stochastic frontier analysis is utilized to estimate how much institutional quality...

This paper investigates the pattern of teaching and research performances, the relationship between them, and the convergence for Italian public HEIs in the period 2000–2010, by comparing different bootstrap robust non-parametric frontier estimators. Overall we find an efficiency improvement,...