This paper provides an empirical investigation of the relationship between welfare expenditures and preferences for leisure consumption. The analysis is based on an unbalanced panel of 21 OECD countries and uses several fixed effects estimators to take into account cultural and social...

We study the distribution of funds in Sicily (the Autonomous Sicilian Region) to the heritage authorities of regional governments. Using data uniquely available for the nine provinces of Sicily for the period of 1992–2002, we find that the allocation of funding for cultural heritage...

In the last decade, Italy has experienced a considerable decentralization of functions to the regions. This transformation has been especially relevant for the National Health System that has de facto assumed a federal system design. The federal reform aimed at disciplining public health...

In this work, adopting a semi-parametric approach and a quasi-experiment setting, we empirically assess the effects of a reform of public procurement regulation in Italy, approved in 2011, that increased the discretion of bureaucrats in selecting the procurer. To this end, employing a large...

The aim of this study is to examine the role of institutional quality and its pillars on the cost efficiency of social services provided by local governments in Italy. To this end, a new advancement of panel cost stochastic frontier analysis is utilized to estimate how much institutional quality...