A large body of literature, mainly based on hospital costs, shows that time to death (TTD) is by far a better predictor of health spending than age. In this paper, we investigate if this finding holds true also in presence of outpatient costs (drugs, diagnostic tests and specialist visits). Our...

In this paper we empirically study the relationship between education attainment and Body Mass Index (BMI), using as theoretical reference an energy balance model. Our data consist of individual level data from eight waves of the Italian survey on life-styles. We use Quantile Regression (QR)...

In this work we investigate the causal impact of cost sharing schemes on drug compliance using a Difference-in-Differences approach within a quantile regression framework. We exploit a series of natural experiments occurred in Italy between 2000 and 2010, referring to the introduction of...

This paper presents an indirect approach to investigate the possible existence of measurement error bias in the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices for the UK and Italy. Our empirical results show that there is no significant evidence for a bias in the UK, nor for Italy prior to the introduction...

This paper examines the impact of regulatory intervention to cut termination rates of calls from fixed lines to mobile phones. Under quite general conditions of competition, theory suggests that lower termination charges will result in higher prices for mobile subscribers, a phenomenon known as...

For non-stationary vector autoregressive models (VAR hereafter, or VAR with moving average, VARMA hereafter), we show that the presence of common cyclical features or cointegration leads to a reduction of the order of the implied univariate autoregressive-moving average (ARIMA hereafter) models....

We build on the existing literature in Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to analyze the main incentive issues in PPPs and the shape of optimal contracts in those contexts. We present a basic model of procurement in a multi-task environment in which a risk averse firm chooses non-contractible...

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a...

Warnings commonly formulated about the use of the "weighted average cost of capital" (WACC) are at all inapplicable when dealing with a new project. In this case, namely, the WACC must be calculated with respect to properly defined book values, not to yet non-existing market ones; nor can a...

We examine by means of an artefactual field experiment on a representative sample of Italian adults, the impact of information and belief elicitation on charitable-giving when donors know (or express their beliefs on) what the organizations received in terms of aggregate donations in the past....