Several authors (Berry 1970, Krugman 1996 or Eaton and Eckstein 1997, among many others) have experienced amazement about the accurate functioning of the law of "least effort" established by Zipf (1949) in most places. Cities, ranked by population, seem to follow almost exactly a log/log...

The main objective of the study is the development of a model for the evaluation of the environmental and energy efficiency of the interaction (mobility) and land use structure (called as 'territorial functionality'), applied to the metropolitan area of Barcelona . In particular there are four...

This paper reviews the literature on reference pricing (RP) in pharmaceutical markets. The RP strategy for cost containment of expenditure on drugs is analyzed as part of the procurement mechanism. We review the existing literature and the state-of-the-art regarding RP by focusing on its...

The goal of this paper is to present an optimal resource allocation model for the regional allocation of public service inputs. The proposed solution leads to maximise the relative public service availability in regions located below the best availability frontier, subject to exogenous budget...

The principal aim of this paper is to estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and an inefficiency effects model in the analysis of the primary health care services purchased by the public authority and supplied by 180 providers in 1996 in Catalonia. The evidence from our sample does not...