Working conditions in Western countries have changed dramatically in the last twenty years, witnessing the emergence of new forms of employment contracts. The number of "standard" fulltime permanent jobs has decreased, while non-standard work arrangements such as temporary, contingent or...

This paper explores the use of anchoring vignettes as a means to adjust survey reports of health system performance for differential reporting behaviour using data contained within the World Health Survey (WHS). Survey respondents are asked to rate their experiences of health systems across a...

Despite the growing popularity of the vignette methodology to deal with self-reported, categorical data, the formal evaluation of the validity of this methodology is still a topic of research. Some critical assumptions need to hold in order for this method to be valid. In this paper we analyse...

Sutton (1991, Sunk costs and market structure. Cambridge: MIT Press; 1998, Technology and market structure. Cambridge: MIT Press) theorised that industries evolve into distinct market configurations in terms of concentration, depending upon product homogeneity and whether R&D or advertising are...

The World Health Report 2000 proposed three fundamental goals for health systems encompassing population health, health care finance and health systems responsiveness. The goals incorporate both an efficiency and equity dimension. While inequalities in population health and health care finance...

This paper compares the use of parametric and non-parametric approaches to adjust for heterogeneity in self-reported data. Despite the growing popularity of the HOPIT model to account for reporting heterogeneity when dealing with self-reported categorical data, recent evidence has questioned the...

Each year about 20% of the 10 million hospital inpatients in Italy get admitted to hospitals outside the Local Health Authority of residence. In this paper we carefully explore this phenomenon and estimate gravity equations for ‘trade’ in hospital care using a Poisson pseudo-maximum...