In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed...

This paper explores the relationship between the presence of organised crime in local institutions and the educational outcomes in Southern Italy. To this purpose, we have built a contemporary index of Mafia institutional infiltration that proxies the (scale of) values that parents transmit to...

In the last few years, countries and commercial firms are increasingly interested in space activities for civil, military, and commercial purposes (Undseth et al., 2020). As it has been shown in NASA report (2019), investment in space program drives to significant economic benefits to the whole...

In this work, adopting a semi-parametric approach and a quasi-experiment setting, we empirically assess the effects of a reform of public procurement regulation in Italy, approved in 2011, that increased the discretion of bureaucrats in selecting the procurer. To this end, employing a large...

Behavioral economics is, nowadays, a well-established approach to investigate agents’ actions under economic incentives. In the last decade, a fast-growing number of studies have focused on the application of behavioral to health policy issues. The results of that stream of literature have...

Public infrastructure procurement is crucial as a prerequisite for public and private investments and for economic and social capital growth. However, low performance in execution severely hinders infrastructure provision and benefits delivery. One of the most sensitive phases in public...

A large body of literature has analyzed the relationship between factors affecting institutional quality at local level and the efficiency of firms with a particular focus on the role of corruption. However, due to reverse causality, the endogeneity problem makes it difficult to identify the...

The aim of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the role of competition in procurement in reducing the effects of corruption. For this purpose, the paper examines whether competition is able to constrain the waste effects of corruption on the efficiency of execution of public works,...

Government regulation plays a significant role in the field of heritage conservation. Namely, regulation is aimed at controlling the stock of heritage, restricting or modifying the activities of public as well as private actors. Surprisingly, the literature has neither extensively investigated...