The aim of this paper is to study whether corruption spreads across neighboring countries. Spatial econometric techniques are used to analyze corruption interactions, testing whether the perception of corruption in neighboring countries affect a country's own corruption once other variables are...

This paper analyses region-level technical efficiency in the European Union over the 1995 to 2007 period. We propose the application of a nonparametric conditional frontier methodology to account for the presence of geographical externalities that are beyond the control of regional authorities....

A new production-frontier specification is proposed when dealing with decision-making units whose efficiencies are correlated with the performances of the neighbors (spatial dependence), providing a bias reduction with respect to standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. For the...

The study of corruption is attracting lot of attention in recent years. Focusing on the economic consequences of corruption, the empirical evidence points to a positive relation between institutional integrity, or absence of corruption, and economic growth. Although most developed countries tend...

Measuring efficiency in the education sector is a highly complex task. One of the reasons is that the main resource of schools (the type of students they have) lie outside of their control, which means that it must be treated differently to other factors in analysis. This study examines the...

This paper examines the role that weight restrictions play in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). It is argued that the decision to include a factor (input or output) in a DEA model represents an implicit judgement that the factor has a non-trivial weight. It therefore seems perverse to allow DEA...

The study of corruption is attracting lot of attention in recent years. Focusing on the economic consequences of corruption, the empirical evidence points to a positive relation between institutional integrity, or absence of corruption, and economic growth. Although most developed countries tend...

The quality of primary care should ultimately be judged on the effect of health outcome of individual patients. However, for the foreseeable future, it is inconceivable that the necessary data will be available to implement this principle. And in any case, specification of the necessary...