Objectives: This paper investigates empirically whether the institutional features of the contracting authority as well as the level of ‘environmental’ corruption in the area where the work is localised affect the efficient execution of public contracts for healthcare...

Although the performance of the tourism sector has been investigated extensively, the effects of institutional governance have largely been unexplored. This study uses a quasi-natural experiment setting owing to differences in tourism policy devolution between special and ordinary statute...

Based on the literature on public procurement regulation, we use an Agent-Based Model to assess the performance of different selection procedures. Specifically, we aim at investigating whether and how the inclusion of reputation of firms in the public procurement selection process affects the...

Government regulation plays a significant role in the field of heritage conservation. Namely, regulation is aimed at controlling the stock of heritage, restricting or modifying the activities of public as well as private actors. Surprisingly, the literature has neither extensively investigated...

The diffusion of digital information and communication technologies (ICT) in public services is generally assumed to improve their performance. However, the impact of ICT on the efficiency of public services is rarely verified. This study focuses on public historical archives (PHAs), which are a...

In Italy, public state libraries are multi-product organizations preserving ancient books of great historical relevance for future generations, and providing divisible services to the public. Hence, they may undertake different activities for conservation and use, which together constitute a...

The article explores the effects of cultural heritage in fostering tourism demand. We look at the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) in the enhancement of tourism destinations (TDs) competitiveness. In such a perspective, taking Italian regions in the period 1995–2010 as a case study,...

Almost everywhere public intervention in cultural heritage (CH) conservation is widespread. Using Italy as a case study, the paper analyses public capital expenditure for CH conservation and investigates whether the high degree of specialization of contracting authorities affects the efficiency...

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to investigate how the differences across the regional reimbursement mechanisms and in particular the use of the DRGs impact on the level in the high technology equipment diffusion.MethodsBased on hospital sector data at a regional level we build up indicators...

In this paper, we investigate the association between the efficiency of infrastructure provision and the level of corruption, in the province in which the infrastructure takes place, employing a large dataset on Italian public works contracts. We, first, estimate efficiency in public...