In the economic literature increasing attention is paid to the efficiency evaluation in the cultural sector. However, so far, the performance of archives is rarely investigated, notwithstanding their cultural and historical relevance. Indeed, the analysis of archives raises interesting...

Nowadays different healthcare policies in OECD countries seem to consider hospital readmission somehow “quality dependent”. Nonetheless, the theoretical literature on the incentives provided by payment systems tend to disregard this aspect, which indeed might be relevant in driving...

We study the distribution of funds in Sicily (the Autonomous Sicilian Region) to the heritage authorities of regional governments. Using data uniquely available for the nine provinces of Sicily for the period of 1992–2002, we find that the allocation of funding for cultural heritage...

The diffusion of digital information and communication technologies (ICT) in public services is generally assumed to improve their performance. However, the impact of ICT on the efficiency of public services is rarely verified. This study focuses on public historical archives (PHAs), which are a...

In Italy, public state libraries are multi-product organizations preserving ancient books of great historical relevance for future generations, and providing divisible services to the public. Hence, they may undertake different activities for conservation and use, which together constitute a...

This paper investigates the pattern of teaching and research performances, the relationship between them, and the convergence for Italian public HEIs in the period 2000–2010, by comparing different bootstrap robust non-parametric frontier estimators. Overall we find an efficiency improvement,...

The article explores the effects of cultural heritage in fostering tourism demand. We look at the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) in the enhancement of tourism destinations (TDs) competitiveness. In such a perspective, taking Italian regions in the period 1995–2010 as a case study,...

Almost everywhere public intervention in cultural heritage (CH) conservation is widespread. Using Italy as a case study, the paper analyses public capital expenditure for CH conservation and investigates whether the high degree of specialization of contracting authorities affects the efficiency...

This paper aims at analysing the time performance of infrastructure procurement based on the characteristics of the contracting authorities involved. We focus on the execution stage, which is crucial for the efficient provision of public works and their planned benefits. An empirical analysis,...