We investigate the sources and determinants of output growth of Italian manufacturing firms. Applying stochastic frontier techniques, we decompose output growth into factor accumulation and TFP growth from 1998 to 2003. TFP growth is further decomposed into technological change, efficiency...

We investigate the determinants of TFP growth of Italian manufacturing firms. Using stochastic frontier techniques, we consider three approaches to take into account the influence of external factors, i.e., the determinants of growth. First, external factors may affect the shape of the...

We investigate the determinants of TFP growth of Italian manufacturing firms. Using stochastic frontier techniques, we consider three approaches for taking into account the influence of external factors, i.e., the determinants or drivers of growth. First, in our novel approach external factors...

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...

We carried out a survey among a large group of undergraduate students of different disciplines to test whether the study of economics influences students' view on profit maximization and the market mechanism. We find that there are significant differences between economics students and the...

We carried out a survey among a large group of undergraduate students of different disciplines and different years to test whether the study of economics or scientific majors influences the degree by which people are affected by money illusion. We find significant differences between first-year...

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...

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