1,721,039 research outputs found
Procuring medical devices: evidence from Italian public tenders
No full textThe public procurement of medical devices is increasingly relying on auction mechanisms to move toward more transparent procedures and to promote competition between suppliers in a market where the quality of the products matters enormously. An improper auction
design could lead to ine cient outcomes, such as a market with higher-than-optimal prices, or lower-than-optimal quality. Based on Italian public tender data, we present new evidence on the performance of the public tenders to procure orthopaedic prosthesis for hips, knees
and shoulders. Focusing on three main outcomes, the number of participants, the presence of a single rm bidding and the winning rebate, for the rst time we describe how features related to the tender, hospital, region and bidders' competition all contribute to explain the functioning of the procurement auctions. The evidence we obtain can meaningfully help policy makers in designing and implementing better public procurement systems
Procuring medical devices: evidence from Italian public tenders
No full textThe public procurement of medical devices is increasingly relying on auction mechanisms to move toward more transparent procedures and to promote competition between suppliers in a market where the quality of the products matters enormously and an improper auction design could be very harmful. Based on Italian hospital data, we present new evidence on the performance of the public tenders to procure orthopaedic prosthesis for hips, knees and shoulders. Focusing on three main outcomes, the number of participants, the presence of a single firm bidding and the winning rebate, for the first time we describe how features related to the tender, hospital, region and bidders' competition all contribute to explain the functioning of the procurement auctions. The evidence we obtain can meaningfully help policy makers in designing and implementing better public procurement systems
Procuring medical devices: the price effect of mergers among orthopedic prostheses producers
Full text linkThis paper quantifies the price effects of a merger between two major producers of
orthopedic prostheses. It shows that, in the public procurement markets where these
products are purchased, the effect of the merger hinges on the characteristics of both
the procurement design and the organizational structure of the buyers
Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes
No full textThis paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy and link this data to unique historical data with detailed information about war casualties and Nazi raids across space (Municipality) and time. We find that prenatal stress exposure leads to lower wage earnings when workers start their career, and that this effect persists until retirement. The earnings penalty is in large part due to the type of job that people hold and interruptions in their working career due to unemployment. We further show that workers exposed to in-utero stress face larger earnings reductions after job loss due to mass layoffs. This earnings loss deepens their relative disadvantage over time
The changing relationship between bodyweight and longevity in high- and low-income countries
Full text linkStandard measures of bodyweight (overweight and obese, for example) fail to reflect differences across populations and technological progress over time. This paper builds on the pioneering work of Hans Waaler (1984) and Robert Fogel (1994) to empirically estimate how the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and longevity varies across high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Importantly, we show that these differences are so profound that the share of national populations above mortality -minimizing bodyweight is not clearly greater in countries with higher overweight and obesity rates (as traditionally defined)-and in fact, relative to current standards, a larger share of low-income countries' populations can be unhealthily heavy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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