The use of Diagnostic Related Groups (DRG) as a mechanism for hospital financing is a currently debated topic in Portugal. The DRG system was scheduled to be initiated by the Health Ministry of Portugal on January 1, 1990 as an instrument for the allocation of public hospital budgets funded by...

The purpose of this paper is to test whether finance constraints create an incentive for debt-constrained firms to improve efficiency along time, using a sample of 1124 firms from the Italian manufac- turing over the period 1989-1994. Technical efficiency change indices are derived using a new...

We study the role of governance regimes in the determination of corruption and economic growth. Our model identifies two governance regimes and shows that the relationship between corruption and growth is regime specific. We use a threshold model to estimate the impact of corruption on growth...

This paper proposes a model of workplace-specific unions that integrates two (conflicting) views of what unions do: one that unions mainly engage in rent extraction, the other that unions mainly engage in rent creation by providing agency services that increase workplace productivity. In our...

A surprisingly small number of innovative firms use the patent system. In the UK, the share of firms patenting among those reporting that they have innovated is about 4%. Survey data from the same firms support the idea that they do not consider patents or other forms of registered IP as...

The performance of the British retail sectors in terms of productivity growth is not brilliant. This paper focuses on a specific component of productivity growth (technical efficiency) and tests the extent to which its variance across the sector can be explained by the differences in the...

In this paper, we aim to fill the gap in the banking literature by quantifying the impact that the Schumpeterian competition mode – i.e. competition through the launch of new products (or new varieties of products) – has on the cost and profit efficiency of a sample of commercial banks based...

In this paper, we test the extent to which producers' cooperatives can experience an increase in technical efficiency following a tightening of financial constraints. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms for the wine production and processing...

As competition in the banking sector has intensified over the last two decades, commercial banks have started to use trademarks to differentiate their products and services from those offered by their competitors. Less clear are the implications of the trademarking activities on the commercial...