The problem of taking into account the quality attributes of different goods has a long tradition in economics A strand of literature deals with the environmental impacts in the measurement of efficiency and productivity growth. Färe et al. (1989) indeed started what has become now a relatively...

The paper proposes a methodology to measure the characteristics of intermediate products when quality is multidimensional. It uses a general representation of the multioutput technology via directional distance functions and constructs quality indicators based on differences. The quality...

Do good looks make people more productive? An impact of looks on earnings has been found in the empirical literature: plain people earn less than average-looking people who earn less than the good-looking. However, an important question remains unanswered: is the impact of beauty due to pure...

The paper designs an optimal payment system for a group of producers implementing it empirically. It shows how to implement the first best through higher prices for better quality commodities, deriving the optimal pricing schedule. It also takes into account producers' heterogeneity by modelling...

The problem of taking into account the quality attributes of different goods has a long tradition in economics A strand of literature deals with the environmental impacts in the measurement of efficiency and productivity growth. Färe et al. (1989) indeed started what has become now a relatively...

<i> L’analisi dell’efficienza tecnica nel settore della sanità. Un’applicazione al caso della Lombardia </i> (di Gian Paolo Barbetta e Gilberto Turati) - ABSTRACT: The paper measures the technical efficiency in the health care industry. Our aim is twofold: on one side we have a methodological...

In this paper we attempt to identify behavioral differences between public and private not-for-profit hospitals, by exploiting the introduction of the DRG-based payment system in the Italian NHS during the second half of the 1990s. We estimate the technical efficiency of a sample of hospitals...

In this paper, we focus on a specific component of economically rel- evant trust, i.e. on what we call `institutionally produced generalized trust', defined as the amount of widespread trust (which is a public good for the economic system as a whole) endogenously and continuously gen- erated by...