Over-crowding in Emergency Departments (EDs) generates potential inefficiencies. Using regional administrative data, we investigate the impact of an increase in the accessibility of primary care on ED visits in Italy. We test whether extending practice opening hours up to 12 hours/day reduces...

Studies of the hospital volume-outcome relationship have highlighted that a greater volume activity improves patient outcomes. While this finding has been known for years in health services research, most studies to date have failed to delve into what underlies this relationship. This study...

Pay-for-performance programs offering additional payments to GPs can be used not only to improve the quality of care but also for cost containment purposes. In this paper, we analyze the impact of removing financial incentives in primary care that were aimed at containing hospital expenditure in...

Over-crowding in Emergency Departments (EDs) generates potential inefficiencies. Using regional administrative data, we investigate the impact of an increase in the accessibility of primary care on ED visits in Italy. We test whether extending practice opening hours up to 12 hours/day reduces...

The reformulation of existing boundaries between primary and secondary care, in order to shift selected services traditionally provided by Emergency Departments to community-based alternatives has determined a variety of organisational solutions aimed at reducing the ED overcrowding. One...

We study a simple exogeneity test in count data models with possibly endogenous multinomial treatment. The test is based on Two Stage Residual Inclusion (2SRI). Results from a broad Monte Carlo study provide novel evidence on important features of this approach in nonlinear settings. We find...

Background: The increased availability of claims data allows one to build high dimensional datasets, rich in covariates, for accurately estimating treatment effects in medical and epidemiological cohort studies. This paper shows the full potential of machine learning for the estimation of...

Financial incentives are increasingly adopted to improve allocative efficiency and quality in primary care. Although it has been recognised that incentive-based remuneration schemes can have an impact on GP behaviour, there is still weak empirical evidence on the extent to which such programs...

We study jointly the health perception of the elderly and the care giving decision of their adult children. Social interactions play a crucial role: elder parents' health perception depends on relations with household members. On the other hand adult children make their care giving decisions...

Impact evaluations of development programmes usually focus on a comparison of participants with a control group. However, if the programme generates externalities for non-participants such an approach will capture only part of the programme’s impact. Based on a unique large-scale quantitative...