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...

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 Ramón y Cajal Program promotes the hiring of top researchers in Spanish R&D centers and academic institutions. The centralized mechanism associated to the Program is analyzed. The paper models it as a two-sided matching market and studies if it provides the incentives to increase the...

In this paper we present a model of implementation based on the idea that agents renegotiate unfeasible allocations. We characterize the maximal set of Social Choice Correspondences that can be implemented in Nash Equilibrium with a class of renegotiation functions that do not reward agents for...

In a common-values election with two candidates voters receive a signal about which candidate is superior. They can acquire information that improves the precision of the signal. Electors differ in their information acquisition costs. For large electorates a non negligible fraction of voters...

We analyze the evolution on the design of a policy measure promoted by the Spanish Government: the Ramón y Cajal Program. In the first calls of the Program, an eligibility requirement for a researcher was a preacceptance from at least one Spanish research insti- tution. This requirement was...