The main objective of this article is to evaluate to which extent the set of national and regional cost control policies implemented in recent years in Italy have affected hospital activity. Our contribution is mainly empirical as we focus our attention on the impact that policies like hospital...

Understanding the role that drug adherence has on health outcomes in everyday clinical practice is central for the policy maker. This is particularly true when patients suffer from asymptomatic chronic conditions (i.e., hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes). By exploiting a unique...

The aim of the paper is to disentangle the roles that patients, physicians and technology can have on patient health outcomes using a large and detailed dataset of Italian patients collected by the Italian College of General Practitioners (SIMG) over the period 2001–2006. As our data show the...

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: Minimum Efficacy Standards (MES) and Price Controls (PC). We develop a model of adverse selection where a...

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting an Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression...

This article examines the long term physical and mental health effects of internal migration. We use data from Italy that allows us to study a relatively unique migration experience from Southern and Northeastern regions of Italy to Northwestern ones and to the region around Rome concentrated...

This paper describes sfcross and sfpanel, two new Stata commands for the estimation of cross-sectional and panel data stochastic frontier models. sfcross extends the offi cial frontier capabilities by including additional models (Greene 2003; Wang 2002) and command functionality, such as the...

The last few decades have been characterized by an increase in the number of years lived in bad health, lending support to the “Expansion of Morbidity” hypothesis. In this paper we propose the “Double Expansion of Morbidity” (DEM) hypothesis, arguing that not only life expectancy gains...

Throughout history, technological progress has transformed population health, but the distributional effects of these gains are unclear. New substitutes for older, more expensive health technologies can produce convergence in population health outcomes, but may also be prone to "elite capture"...

Recent improvements in population health have been possible thanks to advances in sanitation and health technology. Several treatments, procedures and diagnostic devices have revolutionized modern epidemiological patterns, turning once deadly diseases into curable or preventable conditions,...