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...

The general elections held in February 2013 marked an earthquake in Italian politics. The two coalitions on the center-left and center-right that had governed Italy alternately between 1996 and 2011 together lost 11 million votes compared to the 2008 elections. The explanations advanced for this...

This paper aims to analyze phenomena such as the diffusion of non-standard work and the incidence of low-paid work from a distinctive, and generally neglected angle: that of occupations. Much can be gained from a more fine-grained analysis of labour market dynamics that casts light on which...

This paper deals with the open issue about the choice between a centralized versus a decentralized public procurement strategy. Using a unique dataset on tender prices of selected drugs for hospital usage awarded by a sample of 52 Italian local health service providers (ASLs) between 2009 and...

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...

In all European countries, emergency policy measures have been introduced in order to counteract the employment consequences of the economic crisis. In the context of variously composed anticrisis packages, many European countries have used Short-Time Work (STW) schemes, that is measures to...