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 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...

This paper proposes a stochastic frontier panel data model in which unit-specific inefficiencies are spatially correlated. In particular, this model has simultaneously three important features: i) the total inefficiency of a productive unit depends on its own inefficiency and on the inefficiency...

The classic stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism to disentangle individual time invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a,b) proposed a fixed-effects model specification that distinguishes these two latent components and allows a time varying...

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 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...

xsmle is a new command for spatial analysis using Stata. We consider the quasi-maximum likelihood estimation of a wide set of both fi xed- and random- eff ects spatial models for balanced panel data. Of special note is that xsmle allows to handle unbalanced panels thanks to its full...

In this work we present some results obtained with a unique database of patient level data collected through GPs. The availability of such data opens new scenarios and paradigms for the planning and management of the health care system and for policy impact evaluation studies. The data set,...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of public European LTC systems in the forthcoming decades, using the Europe Future Elderly Model (EuFEM), a dynamic microsimulation model which projects the health and socio-economic characteristics of the 50 population of ten European countries,...

This paper investigates the impact of business property taxation on firms' performance using a panel of Italian manufacturing firms. To account for endogeneity in local taxation, we exploit a pairwise spatial differenced generalized method of moments estimator. As well as providing robust...