Calogero Guccio

Determinants of adaptation costs in procurement: an empirical estimation on Italian public works contracts

It is widely agreed that rules governing public procurement should be designed to achieve value for money. However, in the public works sector, ‘… the good being procured is usually complex and hard to be exactly specified ex ante, … [and] alterations to the original project might be needed after the contract is awarded. This may result in considerable discrepancies between the lowest winning bid and the actual costs that are incurred by the buyer’ (Bajari et al., 2006). There is now a wide body of literature focusing on cost escalation during the execution of contracts and their estimates reveal that it can be often quite large. This article is aimed at offering an empirical test of the determinants of adaptation costs in the public works procurement. Using a detailed data set on Italian public works contracts, we run an empirical analysis, grounded on the main conclusions reached in the literature, to test for the main drivers of adaptation costs.

The effects of reimbursement mechanisms on medical technology diffusion in the hospital sector in the Italian NHS

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences across the regional reimbursement mechanisms and in particular the use of the DRGs impact on the level in the high technology equipment diffusion. METHODS Based on hospital sector data at a regional level we build up indicators to measure the regional diffusion of high technological medical equipment in the period 1997-2007. These indicators are regressed on regional healthcare characteristics to investigate the relationship between the different reimbursement systems offered by Italian regions and the level of high technological medical equipment. RESULTS Our results suggest that the per-case payment system is generally associated with a lower level of regional technology endowment per million of inhabitants, especially for the complex and expensive medical equipment. CONCLUSIONS Our findings cast some doubts that an effective regulation of reimbursement mechanisms cannot limit the excessive diffusion of medical equipment that is a relevant driver of the increase in expenditure.

UNESCO sites and performance trend of Italian regional tourism destinations: A two-stage DEA window analysis with spatial interaction

This article analyzes the role of United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sites on the enhancement of tourism destinations (TDs) performance, taking the Italian regions over the period 1995–2010 as a case study. Specifically, we aim at studying the effect of the inscription in the World Heritage List (WHL) upon the dynamics of the efficiency of the Italian regions as TDs. We use a two-stage data envelopment analysis window analysis, to detect efficiency trends and resort to both semiparametric pooled-truncated and panel data estimators to evaluate the determinants of the efficiency changes in TDs over time. Moreover, we test for the presence of spatial dependence in the efficiency of TDs. The results reveal that the WHL does not play a significant role in enhancing technical efficiency of TDs. These empirical findings are robust to alternative estimators and model specifications. Furthermore, the spatial analysis does not reveal significant spillover effects in the efficiency of TDs.

Measuring the efficient management of public works contracts: A non-parametric approach

The efficiency of execution of public works contracts is usually defined in terms of the capacity to complete works within the costs and the time agreed on in the contract. Therefore, it has been traditionally measured considering either costs overruns or delays. Our purpose is to consider both measures simultaneously, so as to develop a measure of overall efficiency of public works contracts execution. We compute this measure, through a benchmark procedure, using a non-parametric approach (DEA - Data Envelopment Analysis). The analysis is carried out employing a detailed data set of Italian public contracts for roads and highways, in the period 2000- 2005.

Efficiency assessment and convergence in teaching and research in Italian public universities

This paper investigates the pattern of teaching and research performances, the relationship between them, and the convergence for Italian public HEIs in the period 2000–2010, by comparing different bootstrap robust non-parametric frontier estimators. Overall we find an efficiency improvement, mainly driven by research, whereas teaching efficiency increases only in the very first years of the sample period. We also ascertain a slightly positive relationship between research and teaching performances. Furthermore, we find that Italian HEIs converge, in the observed period, although research and teaching do it at a different pace. Our empirical findings are robust to alternative estimators and bootstrapped bias correction.

Selezione dei fornitori e incentivi alla rinegoziazione in contratti incompleti: rilevanza empirica nel settore dei lavori pubblici

The literature on public procurement pays great attention to the rules underlying tendering procedures as well as on the specification of the type of contract to be awarded. Less attention has been paid to the incompleteness of the contract; this issue is relevant in the public work sector because it offers room for the contract renegotiation and, therefore, for the increase of the final price. This paper offers empirical evidence of the potential effects of different tendering procedures (i.e. negotiation vs auction) on the contract renegotiation in the public work sector. The results show that, in presence of incomplete contracts, an excessive emphasis on the tendering rules, in absence of an efficient system of sanctions and incentives, can induce firms to behave strategically: they will offer very low bids to be awarded the contract, looking for renegotiating during the contract implementation.

Bottlenecks or Inefficiency? An Assessment of First Instance Italian Courts’ Performance

Abstract The efficiency and effectiveness of judicial systems has become one of the main points of interest in public sector administration, due to the beneficial effects of an efficient judicial system on economic growth and firm competition. This is particularly relevant in Italy where judicial proceedings are extremely long-lasting due to the huge (in)efficiency of courts and to the presence of bottlenecks that affect the efficient management of court activity. This paper attempts to measure the relative technical efficiency of Italian first instance courts in the period 2010–2011 by applying a non-parametric frontier and distinguishing between managerial (in)efficiency and (in)efficiency due to the non-discretionary caseload. Our findings show that, while the presence of bottlenecks in the caseload plays a role in the level of court inefficiency, this effect is relatively small compared with the inefficiency due to the lack of managerial ability to efficiently manage both the backlog and increases in filings. Furthermore, this outcome is more relevant in the South rather than in the North of the country. Finally, our empirical findings are robust to an alternative estimator and sample variation.

Does Unesco inscription affect the performance of tourism destinations? A regional perspective

This paper analyses the role of tourism in the enhancement of local development focusing on the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) as attractor of tourism demand. It aims at evaluating the performance of the Italian regions as tourism destinations in the period 1995-2010, using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) two-stage approach. In the first stage the efficiency scores are calculated using a smoothed DEA bootstrap procedure to generate unbiased technical efficiency estimates. In the second stage a robust semi-parametric regression is employed to assess the impact of the WHL inscription on the efficiency of tourism destinations in the short and in the long term. The empirical results show that, controlling for several environmental factors, the presence of UNESCO sites is negatively correlated to the technical efficiency of tourist destinations. Our explanation for such a result is that WHL inscription raises expectations which are not met by an equivalent increase of tourism flows: this has to be taken in account by policy-makers in the design of the local strategies to promote tourist destinations and therefore to foster local development.

Readmission and Hospital Quality under Prospective Payment System

Nowadays different healthcare policies in OECD countries seem to consider hospital readmissions somehow “quality dependent”. Nonetheless, the theoretical literature on the incentives provided by payment systems tend to disregard this aspect, which indeed might be relevant in driving providers’ behaviour. In this paper we study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and cost-reducing effort under different payment regimes, either a global budgeting or a prospective payment system, considering explicitly the role played by financial incentives directly linked to readmissions. As far as the specific results about quality are concerned, we find that prospective payment systems do not necessarily perform better than retrospective systems if the reimbursement to hospitals is not adjusted to take into account specific outcome-based indicators of quality, such as readmissions. More specifically, if patients readmitted are fully paid to hospitals, moving from a retrospective to a prospective payment systems might even induce a reduction on quality and, in turn, an increase in readmission probability. However, if the prospective payment system is adjusted for internalizing this counter-incentive, by a different payment for patients readmitted, it could be able to foster a higher treatment quality through the competition channel.

Does cultural heritage monetary value have an impact on visits? An assessment using official Italian data

In this article, we try to investigate which factors affect the visits to cultural heritage (CH), using Italy as a case study. We adopt a broad definition of CH including archaeological and historical sites, historical buildings and museums, focusing our attention on State CH. In our empirical analysis, we use a rather innovative indicator of CH value, that is, the monetary value of State CH, officially provided by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Using these data, this article aims at evaluating if such monetary value has a significant role in stimulating visits to cultural sites for the years 1996–2010. We also control for other factors potentially affecting the number of visits to cultural sites, such as alternative tourist attractors and the regional performance in the tourism sector. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to investigate the effect of CH monetary value on cultural participation.