We study the presence and the magnitudes of trade-offs between health outcomes and hospitals' efficiency using a data set from Lombardy, Italy, for the period 2008–2011. Our goal is to analyze whether the pressures for cost containment may affect hospital performance in terms of population...

In this paper we analyze the effects of some distortions induced by the prospective payment system, i.e. upcoding, cream skimming and readmissions, on hospitals' technical efficiency. We estimate a production function using a population-based dataset composed by all active hospitals in an...

Policy makers have made several attempts to limit hospitals upcoding. We investigate the impact on discharges with and without complications of a law introducing a minimum length of stay to discharges with complications. We implement a DID econometric model to assess the impact of the law and a...

This paper investigates the efficiency of Italian hospitals during the period 1998–2007 and consider the impact of some DRG distortions like uocoding, cream skimming and readmission. We apply both a stochastic frontier approach and a multilevel model. We show that readmissions are the most...

We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the underground or shadow economy with a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) � la Tanzi. We introduce three main innovations. First, we take as dependent variable in the money demand equation a direct...

As an answer to soaring oil prices, stabilization mechanisms based on specific taxes, such as the French Tipp flottante, have been discussed and introduced in some countries in early 2000s, but then soon abandoned. Our contribution aims at analysing the excise pass-through and the cost shifting...

ABSTRACT This paper aims to assess the impact on citizens' well‐being of fiscal discipline imposed by the central government on subnational governments. Because healthcare policies involve strategic interactions between different layers of governments in many different countries, we focus on a...