The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

The classical stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism for disentangling individual time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a, b) proposed the ‘true' fixed-effects specification, which distinguishes these two latent components while allowing for...

This paper proposes a stochastic frontier panel data model in which unit-specific inefficiencies are spatially correlated. In particular, this model has simultaneously three important features: i) the total inefficiency of a productive unit depends on its own inefficiency and on the inefficiency...

Abstract not available.

The classic stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism to disentangle individual time invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a,b) proposed a fixed-effects model specification that distinguishes these two latent components and allows a time varying...

The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

This article describes sfcross and sfpanel, two new Stata commands for the estimation of cross-sectional and panel-data stochastic frontier models. sfcross extends the capabilities of the frontier command by including additional models (Greene, 2003, Journal of Productivity Analysis 19: 179–190;...

The classic stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism to disentangle individual time invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a,b) proposed a fixed-effects model specification that distinguishes these two latent components and allows a time varying...

This paper describes sfcross and sfpanel, two new Stata commands for the estimation of cross-sectional and panel data stochastic frontier models. sfcross extends the offi cial frontier capabilities by including additional models (Greene 2003; Wang 2002) and command functionality, such as the...