Roberto Zanola

Flypaper Effect and Sluggishness: Evidence from Regional Health Expenditure in Italy

In Italy, public expenditure reduction is achieved through a revision of social security and health care programs. In particular, public health expenditure control has been implemented through a reform that imposes more stringent budget rules to local governments and a considerable reduction in grants-in-aid from the central government. This paper investigates empirically whether the response to this decrease in categorical lump-sum grants from the central to local governments results in an asymmetric response to intergovernmental grants. Hard budget and soft budget constraint hypotheses are estimated by using a sample of cross-sectional and time observations covering the 20 Italian regions over the period 1989–1993. The main finding is the existence of a standard and a super flypaper effect in both models. The introduction of the soft-budget constraint hypothesis results in a stronger effect of grants and a lower response of own resources which shows that local governments prefer to incur some deficit instead of reducing health care expenditure.

The 'Right' Price for Art Collectibles. A Quantile Hedonic Regression Investigation of Picasso Paintings

Different art objects are likely to be priced by means of different systems of hedonic characteristics; more precisely, different evaluation procedures for high- and low-price items are often postulated. However, the empirical evidence on this point is scant. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap with a quantile hedonic regression approach. Using a dataset of 716 Picasso paintings sold at auction worldwide, the authors highlight the critical role of the price classes in determining the evaluation criteria of art items.

Cinema attendance in Europe.

Although there exists a large body of literature which has empirically investigated the impact of various determinants on cinema attendance, studies that analyse the addictive component of cinema consumption seem to be relatively rare. The aim of this article is to empirically investigate the addictive component of cinema consumption by adopting a cross-country focus. To this aim, the Becker and Murphys rational addiction model has been tested using a pooled cross-section and time-series data on 12 European countries over the period 1989 to 2004. Results provide evidence that cinema consumption seems to conform to a rational addiction hypothesis.

DEA meets Picasso: The impact of auction houses on the hammer price

Employing a hedonic price approach within a framework of central tendencies no conclusive results about the impact of auction houses on final prices of art objects have been found. In order to focus on auction houses as a unit we have applied a benchmarking technique, DEA, developed for efficiency studies. New performance indicators are developed and calculated giving an insight into auction house differences impossible to obtain using hedonic price approach. The performance indicators may also be regarded as quality indicators assuming perfect arbitrage leads to the same unobservable quality of art object obtaining the same price.

The art of benchmarking: Picasso prints and auction house performance

The influence of the auction house on the price of comparable art objects is an issue in the economics of arts literature. The standard approach has been to run hedonic price regressions including the auction house as a dummy variable. The approach in this paper is to apply benchmarking tools developed in the efficiency and productivity literature directly to the auction house as a unit. New performance indices are developed based on a DEA benchmarking technique to analyse auction houses. The new indices discriminate well between auction houses by allowing one to identify both contemporaneous and inter-temporal performances. Additional best performance results are obtained for specific attributes.

Cinema and TV: An Empirical Investigation of Italian Consumers

A number of papers have empirically investigated the rational addiction model proposed by Becker and Murphy (1988) by using data on different harmful drugs; but also activities independent of a biological or pharmaceutical dependency have been analysed, such as cinema. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous works on cinema demand by including two addictive consumption goods, cinema and television. To this aim a panel-data GMM methodology is used to estimate a dynamic model of double rational addiction as proposed by Bask and Melkersonn (2004) using a sample of monthly time- and cross-sectional series covering the 20 Italian regions over the period 2000-2002.

The Determinants of Public Pharmaceutical Expenditures: Does Italian Health Federalism Impact on Them?

Public drug expenditures increased markedly in recent years across Italian Regions and they have become an important issue in the debate on health care cost containment. This paper uses Italian regional data to investigate the determinants of pharmaceutical expenditures. The study differs from previous studies in two principal ways. First, it uses a somewhat larger sample for estimation, with pooled time-series, cross-section data for 20 regions for a 9-year period. Most previous works have used a purely cross-section approach: in this case, the small sample size reduces the statistical reliability of results and limited the number of hypotheses that can be tested simultaneously. Secondly, and following from this, a more extensive range of hypotheses is tested over the period 2001-2003, with particular emphasis on those relating to the relations between national and local measures to control pharmaceutical expenditures and drug consumption. The findings show that the use of co-payments (user charges) and direct distribution result in lower public regional drug expenditure, while genericables seem to reduce public regional drug expenditures.

Read the book and see the film?: the consumption of different versions of cultural goods

Using a sample of individuals that consumed both the book and movie versions of some cultural experience goods, we investigated the precedence and the preference for a particular version. The likelihood of consuming a version increases as information about that version increases. The preference and the precedence in consumption are related to genre, age and reading habits.

Violence and its Impact on Democracy in Colombia

Democracy, Freedom and Coercion comprehensively covers both private and public law, both applied and theoretical issues, and will therefore be of great interest to students studying law and economics.

The Welfare of Investment Deductibility Under a Flat Tax

This paper analyses the welfare effects of investment deductibility in a contest of endogenous growth generated by learning-by-doing and knowledge spillovers. We present a model where a set of revenue neutral fiscal policies, each characterized by different degrees of investment deductibility and different uniform tax rates on income, have been introduced. We show that, given the ratio of public expenditures to national product, partial investment deductibility turns out to be welfare enhancing when the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of consumption is sufficiently small. Our result means that a pure consumption tax-although ensuring more saving and faster growth-is not always preferable to a revenue neutral tax system in which both consumption and investment are taxed. Copyright Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2002.