Public infrastructure procurement is crucial as a prerequisite for public and private investments and for economic and social capital growth. However, low performance in execution severely hinders infrastructure provision and benefits delivery. One of the most sensitive phases in public...

Behavioral economics is, nowadays, a well-established approach to investigate agents’ actions under economic incentives. In the last decade, a fast-growing number of studies have focused on the application of behavioral to health policy issues. The results of that stream of literature have...

A large body of literature has analyzed the relationship between factors affecting institutional quality at local level and the efficiency of firms with a particular focus on the role of corruption. However, due to reverse causality, the endogeneity problem makes it difficult to identify the...

This paper explores the relationship between the presence of organised crime in local institutions and the educational outcomes in Southern Italy. To this purpose, we have built a contemporary index of Mafia institutional infiltration that proxies the (scale of) values that parents transmit to...

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, much emphasis was placed on mortality indicators such as case-fatality rate and crude mortality rates to offer a preliminary assessment of the resilience between healthcare systems. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on the resilience of...

In the last few years, countries and commercial firms are increasingly interested in space activities for civil, military, and commercial purposes (Undseth et al., 2020). As it has been shown in NASA report (2019), investment in space program drives to significant economic benefits to the whole...

The healthcare sector is often considered one of the most prone to corruption and transparency policies have been proposed in several countries to fight bribery and corruption. Indeed, the transparency of public bodies potentially play a relevant role in preventing misbehaviours and favouring...

In this work, adopting a semi-parametric approach and a quasi-experiment setting, we empirically assess the effects of a reform of public procurement regulation in Italy, approved in 2011, that increased the discretion of bureaucrats in selecting the procurer. To this end, employing a large...

Based on the literature on public procurement regulation, we use an Agent-Based Model to assess the performance of different selection procedures. Specifically, we aim at investigating whether and how the inclusion of reputation of firms in the public procurement selection process affects the...

In this paper, we look at the Italian National Health System as a case study, in order to investigate whether competition exerts positive effect on the efficiency of the system. Using the DEA technique we measure the efficiency of accredited hospital production at the regional level; secondly,...