In the last few years there has been an increasing public pressure in many countries to contain costs in the healthcare sector, leading many national governments to introduce some form of prospective payment system and to reduce the scope for global budgeting. In this paper we investigate...

This paper estimates the total factor productivity of the Italian health care sector using a modified bootstrapped Malmquist Index including the quality of the production process provided to the population. Decomposing the productivity process in three different components (efficiency change,...

In this paper we empirically study the relationship between education attainment and Body Mass Index (BMI), using as theoretical reference an energy balance model. Our data consist of individual level data from eight waves of the Italian survey on life-styles. We use Quantile Regression (QR)...

We use the same methodology, that Ecofin-Oecd apply for projecting expenditure in the medium-long term, to reconstruct expenditure in the medium-long past. It is possible to compare the effective expenditure with the reconstructed one. The effective expenditure is of course influenced by policy...

In recent years, health care reforms and restrained budgets have risen concerns about accessibility to health services, even in countries with universal coverage health systems. Previous studies have explored the issue by using objective event-oriented measures such as those related to...

The paper provides an analysis of the determinants of health spending differentials among the Italian Regions for the years 1998-2010. An original standardised spending framework is proposed that takes into account the appropriateness of the services provided and price/technical efficiency, as...

We exploit time variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of a prospective pay systems (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) to assess their impact on self-assessed health status and on the use of health care services. We consider a survey of more than 600,000...

We use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to evaluate the impact of cost-sharing on the use of health services. In the Italian health system, individuals reaching age 65 and earning low incomes are given total exemption from cost-sharing for health services consumption. Since the...

We exploit variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of region-specific tariffs within a Prospective Pay System (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) to assess their impact on health and on the use of health care services. We consider survey data for the years...