In this paper, we study how public and private expenditures in health and education affect economic growth by their influence on peoples health, abilities, skills and knowledge. We consider a growth accounting framework in order to test whether welfare expenditures more than offset the...

In this paper we attempt to identify behavioral differences between public and private not-for-profit hospitals, by exploiting the introduction of the DRG-based payment system in the Italian NHS during the second half of the 1990s. We estimate the technical efficiency of a sample of hospitals...

We study whether local economic conditions in different areas have an impact on the magnitude and direction of the concentration process of a banking industry. By using probit and count data (ZIP) models to study the consolidation of the Italian banking sector in the second half of the 1990s, we...

This paper tests the relationship between time preferences and crime rates as posited by Davis (1988), whose theoretical analysis suggests that individuals’ attitude towards the future significantly affects their propensity to commit crime. Our empirical analysis is based on a panel of Italian...