1,721,079 research outputs found
Political connections in boards of directors
No full textPolitically connected directors dominate board of directors of state-owned enterprises as the public owner’s representatives. Their political influence affects board organization and performance. We propose a framework to analyze the topic with reference to firms in network industries, which are still dominated by state shareholders
Choosing among Alternative Cost Function Specifications: An Application to Italian Multi-utilities
No full textThe paper investigates the cost properties of a sample of Italian utilities providing in combination gas, water and electricity services. The estimates from a multi-product Composite cost function [Rev. Econ. Stat. 74 (1992) 221] are compared with the ones coming from other traditional functional forms such as the Standard Translog (ST), the Generalized Translog (GT), and the Separable Quadratic (SQ). The results show that the composite model provides a better description of data and highlight the presence of global scope and scale economies for the ‘median’ firm of the sample
Vertical and Horizontal Economies in the Electric Utility Industry: An Integrated Approach
No full textScale and (quasi) scope economies in airport technology. An application to UK airports
Full text linkIn this study we consider a sample of the largest UK airports in order to estimate, for the first time for this sector, a multiproduct cost function using a flexible technology that nests most of the specifications commonly employed in the empirical literature. Another novelty of this work is that we provide estimates of quasi- scope economies for the airport industry, defined as the cost advantage for a diversified firm of jointly providing a set of outputs/services with respect to the costs of their provision through a set of firms quasi-specialized in a single production. Our main results suggest the existence of quasi-scope economies that tend to decline with the size of the airport. This finding, coupled with the results of a set of cost complementarity tests, suggest that cost savings mainly arise from the joint provision of services for national and international passengers and, to a lesser extent, to the addition of cargo transport activities. In turn, pairs of outputs that include (a proxy of) commercial revenues seem to be characterized by anti-cost complementarities. Finally, global economies of scale seem to be exhausted at about five million passengers
Scope and scale economies in multi-utilities: Evidence from gas, water and electricity combinations
No full textThe impact of Integrated Tariff Systems on public transport demand: Evidence from Italy
Full text linkRestructuring Hospital Industry to Control Public Health Care Expenditure: The Role of Input Substitutability
Full text linkIn this paper we investigate the economic rationality of the bed downsizing process, characterising the hospital industry worldwide in the last decades, as a measure to control public health care expenditure. Considering a sample of Italian hospitals, we provide fresh evidence on the factor substitutability in the production of hospital services. Differently from other studies, based on North-American data and limited to pre-determined cost function models, we estimate a general specification (the Generalised Composite), and test it against traditional nested models (e.g. the Translog). For all the specifications we derive Allen, Morishima and Shadow elasticities of substitution between input pairs, obtaining a fairly consistent picture across all models and elasticity concepts. In particular, our results highlight a very limited degree of
substitutability between factors in the production of hospital services, especially between beds and medical
staff. These findings suggest that a restructuring policy of the hospital industry, which is confined to reducing
the number of beds without involving workforce management, could not be a viable strategy for controlling
public health care expenditure
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