Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2011 ; 2011ECO011.
Inappropriate use of antibiotic leads to the development of bacterial resistance, which undermines antibiotic effectiveness and increases the cost for society. The aim of this thesis is to investigate economic aspects of antibiotic consumption in the community. The research is divided in three essays. In the first essay we focus on determinants of antibiotic use in Italy and the spillover...
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In: Energy economics, 2013, vol. 36, p. 648-657
This paper presents an empirical analysis on residential demand for electricity. This analysis has been performed using aggregate panel data at the province level for 47 Spanish provinces for the period from 2000 to 2008. For this purpose, we estimated a log–log demand equation for electricity consumption using a dynamic partial adjustment approach. This dynamic demand function has been...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2013 ; 2013ECO002.
Public provision of institutionalized long term care will pose an increasing challenge to the sustainability of public finances. Population ageing has been recognized as one of the main factors driving health care costs increase in Europe and is expected to further raise the demand of nursing home care. To ensure a sustainable system in the next decades, policymakers need evidence on the...
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Regulation of prescription and dispensing of antibiotics has a twin purpose: to enhance access to antibiotic treatment and to reduce inappropriate use of drugs. Nevertheless, incentives on antibiotics to dispensing physicians may lead to inefficiencies. We model the interaction between competing physicians (with and without dispensing of drugs) and patients exposed to bacterial infections when...
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Pressure on health care systems due to the increasing expenditures of the elderly population is pushing policy makers to adopt new regulation and payment schemes for nursing home services. We sketch a simple theoretical model to predict the behavior of nursing homes under different payment schemes. We then investigate the implications of prospective payments on nursing home costs using a...
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The purpose of this study is to analyze the level of cost efficiency of Swiss Post’s postal delivery units to enable policy makers’ as well as Swiss Post to decide on the reactions to market changes. In particular, we use different panel data models to assess cost efficiency in these units to account for unobserved heterogeneity. The results from applying Mundlak’s formulation to the...
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In: Energy economics, 2012, vol. 34, no. 5, p. 1484–1491
This paper estimates a US frontier residential aggregate energy demand function using panel data for 48 ‘states’ over the period 1995 to 2007 using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Utilizing an econometric energy demand model, the (in)efficiency of each state is modelled and it is argued that this represents a measure of the inefficient use of residential energy in each state (i.e....
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In this paper we investigate households demand for school meals using a stated preferences approach. Data are collected through phone-structured interviews to 905 residents with children in the German-speaking region of Switzerland during 2007. A Poisson model with random effects is used to explore factors affecting the demand for meals at school. The results show that meals price, household...
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In Switzerland, nursing home services are mainly provided by regulated public and private nonprofit organizations. Some of them are created by local governments as foundations. This provides a unique setting to analyze the impact of the institutional form on the performance of nursing homes. We propose a model where the institutional form is represented as a legal constraint which affects...
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In: Empirical economics, 2012, vol. 42, no. 2, p. 471-486
Because of bacterial resistance, current antibiotic consumption is reinforced by past use, and future utility is lower. The purpose of this article is to provide evidence on habit and addictive behavior toward antibiotics by exploring variations in the average consumption of antibiotics across 20 Italian regions. Using a balanced panel data set (2000–2009), we estimate myopic and rational...
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