The paper investigates the costs of waste disposal and recycling services by using a well-behaved Composite cost function model. Our estimates on a unique sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities highlight that the refuse collection technology exhibits constant returns to scale as well as...

This paper investigates the determinants of board compensation for a sample of Italian State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). To that purpose, we use a newly collected panel data of 106 local public utilities observed form 1994 through 2004, which includes detailed information on the boards of...

We propose a flexible stochastic framework for modeling the market share dynamics over time in a multiple markets setting, where firms interact within and between markets. Firms undergo stochastic idiosyncratic shocks, which contract their shares, and compete to consolidate their position by...

This paper explores the link between accountability, corruption and efficiency in the context of a career concern model where politically con- nected local monopolies are in charge of the provision of a local public service. We fi?nd that both corruption and a low degree of accountabil- ity...

In this paper, using a sample of Italian passenger transport firms, we compare the estimates from a Composite Cost Function econometric model (Pulley and Braunstein, 1992) with the ones coming from other traditional functional forms such as the Standard Translog, the Generalized Translog, and...

The paper investigates the link between corruption and efficiency by using a rich micro-level dataset concerning solid waste collection activities in 529 Italian municipalities observed over the years 2004-2006. In order to test the impact of corruption on cost efficiency we estimate a...

The focus of the paper is to analyze the costs of solid waste collection by applying a well-behaved multi-product cost function model to a sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities. Beyond shedding light on the presence and on the extent of size (or scale) economies, our aim is to...

The study of properties of mean functionals of random probability measures is an important area of research in the theory of Bayesian nonparametric statistics. Many results are known by now for random Dirichlet means but little is known, especially in terms of posterior distributions, for...

A Bayesian nonparametric methodology has been recently proposed in order to deal with the issue of prediction within species sampling problems. Such problems concern the evaluation, conditional on a sample of size n, of the species variety featured by an additional sample of size m. Genomic...

An important issue in survival analysis is the investigation and the modeling of hazard rates. Within a Bayesian nonparametric framework, a natural and popular approach is to model hazard rates as kernel mixtures with respect to a completely random measure. In this paper we provide a...