In the last decade, Italy has experienced a considerable decentralization of functions to the regions. This transformation has been especially relevant for the National Health System that has de facto assumed a federal system design. The federal reform aimed at disciplining public health...

In medical faculties, teaching and research are carried out together with patient health care. A large body of literature has empirically studied the effects of these joint academic activities, especially in terms of higher hospital costs and better quality of care. An appropriate definition and...

Purpose: This paper aims at contributing to the research on the role played by corruption in the health procurement by use non-parametric techniques to examine whether the efficient execution of Italian public contracts for healthcare infrastructures is affected by socio-economic variables...

This paper explores the relationship between the presence of organised crime in local institutions and the educational outcomes in Southern Italy. To this purpose, we have built a contemporary index of Mafia institutional infiltration that proxies the (scale of) values that parents transmit to...

During the last decades, in many countries retrospective payment systems for hospital care have been replaced by prospective payment methods, mainly DRG-based ones. The latter, though encouraging a more efficient use of hospital resources, present several undesired effects, some of which are...