In this paper we propose a methodology for measuring the ‘relative effectiveness’ of healthcare services (i.e. the effect of hospital care on patients) under general conditions, in which: a) a healthcare outcome underlies qualitative and quantitative observable indicators; ß) we are...

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...

After a short history of the concept of human capital (henceforth HC) in economic thought ( <link rid="ss1">Section 1</link>), this study presents the two main methods for estimating the value of the stock of HC - the retrospective and prospective one - with a review of the models proposed ( <link rid="ss2">Section 2</link>). These methods...

This paper presents a new stochastic frontier model for panel data. The model takes into account firm unobservable heterogeneity and short-run and long-run sources of inefficiency. Each of these features is modeled by a specific random effect. In this way, firms’ latent heterogeneity is not...

In this paper we study the influence of social interaction on patients' hospital choice and its relationship with quality delivered by hospitals, using Italian data. We explore the impact on individual choices of a set of variables such as travel distance, individual- and hospital-specific...

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...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of precarious employment on mental health using a unique dataset that matches information on mental health with labour characteristics for a set of employees in Italy. We examine the causal effect of temporary contracts, their duration and the number of...

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...