L'elemento caratterizzante la riforma federalista è il passaggio dal finanziamento basato sulla spesa storica al finanziamento impostato sul costo standard. Il disegno di legge “Delega al Governo in materia di federalismo fiscale, in attuazione dell'articolo 119 della Costituzione”...

An abnormal expansion of the public sector may create serious problems to the market economy, as the literature suggests. This issue is quite important in countries such as Italy where the size of the public sector and of its debt are quite relevant. In this paper a model, in the microeconomic...

Two of the most widely referred to models of local (or state) budgetary behavior are developed and tested. The models considered are a variant of the flypaper model (see, for example, Courant et al., 1979 and Oates, 1979) and a conventional model which builds on the seminal work of Wilde (1969,...

The traditional literature on agency models predicts that, for zero liability contracts, it is optimal for the principal to pay for the information he cannot observe. However, this principle is not valid for a set of contracts mostly used by government agencies whose distinguishing feature is...

The cost of hospital care depends on the quality of the service, on the personal characteristics of the patient, on the effort of the medical staff and on information asymmetry. In this article the cost minimizing properties of alternative payment systems will be discussed in a context where...

In Italy, public expenditure reduction is achieved through a revision of social security and health care programs. In particular, public health expenditure control has been implemented through a reform that imposes more stringent budget rules to local governments and a considerable reduction in...

In this paper, the use of delay as a tool to improve income redistribution is examined. We assume that people with the highest opportunity cost of waiting address their demand to the private market; if these, as we assume, are the ones at the higher end of the income distribution, they...