The aim of the present study is to provide fresh evidence about the characteristics of cost structure of public transit systems in Italy. The analysis is carried out by comparing the productive performance (average costs and productivity) of small, medium and large-sized companies providing both...

In recent years changes of regulation in European electricity industry have been oriented towards a gradual liberalization of the sector, stressing the issue of energy provision for selling in the open market. Within the Italian regulatory framework, since local public firms cannot compete...

This study provides fresh evidence about the characteristics of technology and cost structure of public transit systems in Italy. The aim is to suggest useful guidelines for facing detected inefficiencies. The analysis is carried out through the estimation of a translog variable cost function....

The core of the present study is to analyse the cost efficiency of public transit systems in Italy, investigating the way subsidization mechanisms and network characteristics affect the x-inefficiency levels of firms. The analysis uses a seven-year (1993-1999) unbalanced panel of 45 Italian...

In this paper we attempt to shed some light on the way the regulation of public transit systems has been approached in the past and is presently addressed in Italy. The reduction of x-inefficiency represents a great challenge for the local authorities, given the high operating costs faced by the...

In this paper we investigate the economic rationality of the bed downsizing process characterising the hospital industry worldwide in the last decades, providing new evidence on the factor substitutability in the production of hospital services. We consider a sample of Italian regional producers...

The aim of this paper is to account for the impact of statistical noise and exogenous regulatory and environmental factors on the efficiency of public transit systems in a DEA-based framework. To this end, we implement a three-stage DEA-SFA mixed approach based on Fried et al. (2002) using a...

In this paper we analyse the cost structure of a sample of Italian Local Public Transport (LPT) companies operating in large urban centres, so as to extend the evidence of some recent studies focused on small-sized and medium-sized operators. The main focus is to verify the presence and the...