Francesco Vidoli

• Phd
• Professor (Associate) at University of Urbino

This study investigates the role of institutional quality in the cost efficiency of social services provided by local governments in Italy. Using a newly developed panel sto-chastic frontier approach, we address the issue of endogeneity, which can lead to biased estimates in efficiency analyses. By analysing a large dataset of social services expen...

The aim of this article is to exploit an innovative spatial econometric approach to map and study the evolving patterns of industrial districts (IDs). The procedure can be classified as a k‐means cluster‐wise regression procedure and is designed to detect homogeneous areas of subcontracting activity. These spatially contiguous aggregations of subco...

In the literature on stochastic frontier models until the early 2000s, the joint consideration of spatial and temporal dimensions was often inadequately addressed, if not completely ne- glected. However, from an evolutionary economics perspective, the production process of the decision-making units constantly changes over both dimensions: it is not...

We investigated the impact of female politicians on waste collection in Italian municipalities in different territories observed over the years 2010-2019. We used a staggered difference-in-differences design to obtain a causal interpretation of the estimated effects. We find that the majority of women in the municipal council positively influence p...

Quality assessment in healthcare systems is challenging due to the multidimensional nature of healthcare services. This study evaluates the overall quality provided by hospitals using composite indicators under the Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) approach, which determines the weights of the indicators with minimal assumptions. We used data from 2015-20...

This study examines the impact of austerity measures on mortality rates across Italian regions from 2003 to 2018. Since 2007, regions experiencing substantial healthcare financial deficits have been required to implement recovery plans (RPs). We use a recent difference-in-differences staggered matching estimator to assess the effects of this auster...

This research introduces a new data-driven methodology for fault detection and isolation in dynamic systems, integrating fuzzy/Bayesian change point detection and decision trees induced by genetic programming for pattern classification. Tracking changes in sensor signals enables the detection of faults, and using decision trees generated by genetic...

The provision of health services plays a central role in the promotion of public welfare and maintaining a healthy society. However, inequalities in access to health care persist between countries, regions, and communities, reflecting the complex interplay of many social, economic, and cultural factors. This article aims to explore the complex rela...

In recent decades, austerity measures have been widely adopted in public healthcare systems, so as to cope with financial constraints. This paper assesses the impact of a specific austerity policy implemented in Italy since 2007, with the purpose of reducing the budget deficit of regional governments originated by an excessive healthcare expenditur...

Over the last 30 years, the number of studies on tax expenditures has gradually increased in most OECD countries: given their importance for tax systems, most countries have decided to estimate revenue issues on a regular basis. Most of these studies have looked at issues such as the loss of tax revenue due to tax expenditures and their distributio...

Spatially heterogeneous weights and a non-compensatory aggregation scheme, are two important properties needed to construct a composite indicator capable of summarizing properly the multidimensional phenomenon of local spatial units. Such a composite indicator takes into account, on the one hand, the latent characteristics of the specific units rel...

Homogeneous national policies can generate heterogeneous effects on the territory. This paper aims to verify the impact of the entry of single Italian municipalities into an inter-municipal association on the unitary costs of the social services supplied to the local communities. Panel cost stochastic frontier model in the presence of endogeneity h...

While individual indicators in health care quality assessment provide detailed insights into specific aspects, they often fail to capture the full and relevant information. Consequently, there is a growing need to develop composite measures that comprehensively assess the overall quality or performance of health care systems, especially those not c...

Italian municipalities finance waste services by applying either a general property tax (''pay-as-you own'' system, PAYO) or, less frequently, a fee calibrated to the waste produced by each household (''pay-as-you throw'' system, PAYT). The aim of this paper is to estimate what would be the impact of a massive implementation of PAYT schemes. We gat...

HEDG Working Paper - University of York, UK https://www.york.ac.uk/economics/hedg/wps/wp2023/

In recent decades, austerity measures have been widely adopted in public healthcare systems, so as to cope with financial constraints. This paper assesses the impact of a specific policy implemented in some Italian regions since 2007 with the purpose of reducing their healthcare spending deficit, the so called Recovery Plans (Piani di rientro), on...

This study provides an original approach to empirically determine the optimal size of municipalities for efficient social service delivery in Italy, accounting for spatial spillover effects across municipalities as well as endogeneity between the output provided and its cost. A highly disaggregated and up-to-date database of Italian municipalities...

Stochastic frontiers are a very popular tool used to compare production units in terms of efficiency. The parameters of this class of models are usually estimated through the use of the classic maximum likelihood method even, in the last years, some authors suggested to conceive and estimate the productive frontier within the quantile regression fr...

This paper discusses the impact of formal cooperation on the performance of Italian firms operating inside and outside industrial districts (IDs). The analysis is focused on a policy tool (Contratti di Rete or network agreements) introduced in Italy to promote the use of non-equity alliances among smaller firms. We claim that the impact of both inw...

Improving the performance of the health care system has become a key policy issue to reduce the tensions between increasing demands and limited resources. In this paper, we address an innovative methodology and application framework for measuring health sector performance at a highly disaggregated level, offering a perspective that has been pursued...

Building on the idea that different hospitals may operate with different technologies, the objective of this paper is a spatial characterization of the production function of hospital services through the identification of different spatial regimes. We introduce an original methodology to identify spatially constrained regimes, namely spatially con...

The paper introduces an approach to identify a set of spatially constrained homogeneous areas maximally homogeneous in terms of epidemic trends. The proposed hierarchical algorithm is based on the Dynamic Time Warping distances between epidemic time trends where units are constrained by a spatial proximity graph. Two different applications of this...

The paper introduces an approach to identify a set of spatially constrained homogeneous areas maximally homogeneous in terms of epidemic trends. The proposed hierarchical algorithm is based on the Dynamic TimeWarping distances between epidemic time trends where units are constrained by a spatial proximity graph. The paper includes two different app...

This paper introduces a new methodology to identify space‐time patterns of regional resilience using a micro‐level approach. The novel empirical tool combines Geographically Weighted Regression with panel Stochastic Frontier Analysis with endogenous covariates. The analysis is implemented on a panel of farm holdings operating in the Italian wine in...

This paper addresses the problem of the simultaneous evaluation of local governments’ standard expenditure needs together with the related level of standard public services proposing a new approach to fiscal equalisation based on quantitative methods. Standard expenditure needs are estimated using quantile regression, moreover robust non-parametric...

This paper introduces a new empirical procedure for the estimation of hospitals' technical efficiency in presence of spatial heterogeneity. We propose a methodology that allows treating spatial heterogeneity independently of a predetermined reference to administrative borders. We define geographical spatial regimes, characterised by spatial proximi...

This paper introduces a new composite indicator method integrating the spatial dependence into the robust directional model in the case of undesirable outputs. The proposed approach is advantageous compared to the traditional and conditional robust Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) models in that it allows to compare the performance of individual units wi...

In the public economics literature expenditure needs, allocative efficiency and spatial dependence of local governments costs have been widely analysed separately implying bias estimations of the expenditure needs at local level. An original procedure that simultaneously takes into account the standard level of services, the allocative efficiency a...

Most of the existing literature on the construction of composite indicator (CI) in the Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) framework fails to consider the exogenous external (tangible or intangible) factors, which might have influences on individual components of the CI. The present research proposes an original method to estimate the CI by considering the...

Il rapporto SaniRegio 2016 fornisce, in linea con le edizioni precedenti, il calcolo della spesa sanitaria standard delle singole Regioni attraverso la stima di una funzione di spesa in cui la distribuzione della popolazione per fasce di età rappresenta il driver principale dei fabbisogni standard determinati prendendo a riferimento la spesa standa...

The choice of the functional form of the frontier into a stochastic frontier model is typically neglected in applications and canonical functions are usually considered. This paper introduces a semiparametric approach for stochastic frontier estimation that extends previous works based on pseudo-likelihood estimators allowing flexibility in model s...

This research estimates the efficiency of a representative sample of Italian wine producers from the Italian FADN survey following a recent spatial stochastic frontier framework that allows to isolate the spatial dependence among units and to evaluate the role of intangible local factors in influencing the economic performance of firms. The empiric...

Theoretically and empirically informed studies on the role and efficiency of the public sector, public wage and employment policy, privatization, tax policy, and fiscal sustainability. The public sector has grown substantially in the last fifty years. In the euro area, for example, total government expenditures have been around fifty percent of GDP...

This paper, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., develops a simple and innovative model for evaluating the performance of local government. It employs a reduced set of information and fewer assumptions than the traditional techniques such as Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. The proposed model is hi...

Abstract This paper introduces an original methodology, derived by the robust order-m model, to estimate technical efficiency with spatial autocorrelated data using a nonparametric approach. The methodology is aimed to identify potential competitors on a subset of productive units that are identified through spatial dependence, thus focusing on pee...

In this paper, we carried out an empirical productive analysis on agricultural Italian farms. In this research area, we propose a new approach of stochastic frontier analysis adopting a generalized additive model framework also compared with Stochastic semi-Nonparametric Envelopment of Z variables Data. By using the Italian National Institute of Ag...

ssfa package allows to include heterogeneity in a different way with respect to traditional techniques: "instead of identifying ex-ante a multitude of determinants, often statistically and economically difficult to detect [...] this approach allow the evaluation of the conjoint effect of a multitude of determinants" (Fusco and Vidoli, 2013) conside...

Spatial Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SSFA) is an original method for controlling the spatial heterogeneity in Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) models by splitting the inefficiency term into three terms: the first one related to spatial peculiarities of the territory in which each single unit operates, the second one related to the specific produ...

Semiparametric Estimation of Stochastic Frontier Models following a two step procedure: in the first step semiparametric or nonparametric regression techniques are used to relax parametric restrictions of the functional form representing technology and in the second step variance parameters are obtained by pseudolikelihood estimators or by method o...

Compind package contains several functions to enhance approaches to the Composite Indicators (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=6278}, https://composite-indicators.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) methods, focusing, in particular, on the normalisation and weighting-aggregation steps. (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Compind/Compind.pdf)

The aim of the present work, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., is to evaluate the technical efficiency of the services provided by General Register Offices in Italy for the year 2009; this estimation exercise has been carried out for the first time on all Italian municipalities separately for each sub-function, highlighti...

An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: T www.CESifo-group.org/wpT CESifo Working Paper No. 5062 Abstract This paper, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., develops a simple and innovative model to evaluate th...

This paper follows the research mainstream aimed to link the efficiency frontier approaches and the composite indicators (CI) methods. More in detail, the main drawbacks of the CI methods based on Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) approach are the sensitivity to the outliers, the perfect compensability and the lack of consideration about the marginal rate...

Il nuovo rapporto SaniRegio fornisce, in linea con le edizioni precedenti, il calcolo della spesa sanitaria corrente standard delle singole Regioni attraverso la stima di una funzione di spesa in cui la distribuzione della popolazione per fasce di età rappresenta il driver principale del fabbisogno standard. Come elemento di stabilità e di similitu...

Firms’ efficiency is a mainstream in the study of economic growth. Within this broad research area, the present work, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., analyses the labour-use efficiency in the Italian machinery industry through the application of a non-parametric stochastic frontier model with the aim of suggesting new i...

In the last decade special attention has been focused on estimating firms efficiency and productivity; Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) has been one of the most used techniques that allows the separation of inefficiency from stochastic noise, assuming homogeneous technology is available to all producers and that there is independence between obse...

The research has the aim of evaluating the differential productive efficiency for a given set of Italian manufacturing firms in order to estimate critical nodes within which companies are structurally similar. We propose a modified version of the two stage Florens et al. (2005) approach, starting from the same non-parametric frontier estimation as...

My P.h.d. thesis - Winner of 2014 award for the best PhD thesis “Giorgio Leonardi” - XXVIII edition, AISRe - aims at implementing a statistical model which simultaneously estimates the standard level of local government expenditure needs and the standard level of local government output. First we introduce a theoretical model which highlights the u...

The aim of this paper is to systematically and consistently present several recent contributions where we have attempted combining two fields: the construction of composite indicators and the measurement of productive efficiency by means of frontier techniques. In particular, we propose correcting the classic Benefit of the Doubt approach index by...

The present paper aims to verify a statistical procedure that allows for the transition from aggregate indicators to disaggregate indicators, whereas in this case, the terms aggregate/disaggregate refer to territorial areas and not to categories. More specifically, an attempt was made to reconstruct the indicators of the infrastructural endowment a...

The aim of this paper is to assess the efficiency of the integrated water service in Italy in recent years, through a robust and flexible methodology. This paper, from a methodological point of view, enhances a ’’two stage’’ method, based on ideas suggested by Florens and Simar (2005), which estimates the efficiency frontier through conditional rob...

Il sistema idrico in Italia è caratterizzato da una moltitudine di forme organizzative e da costi ampiamente divergenti, derivanti sia da differenze industriali, ma anche da inefficienze. L’obiettivo del presente lavoro è quello di valutare l’efficienza tecnica nell’anno 2008 attraverso una metodologia non-parametrica particolarmente flessibile. Da...

Il lavoro qui presentato si inserisce nel filone di studi volto a definire e applicare appropriate metodologie statistiche per la sintesi di indicatori elementari. Il problema è qui declinato con riferimento ad alcuni indicatori elementari di dotazione infrastrutturale (categoria dei trasporti terrestri) disponibili per le province italiane. L’obie...

Applying the Benefit of the Doubt Approach for Indicators Aggregation. The Case of the Infrastructure Endowment in Italy - (Paper first received, October 2007; in final form, febbraio 2008) This paper provides a review of a methodology for constructing composite indicators who constitute the synthesis of a series of simple indicators and, above all...

This paper suggests an original methodology aimed to build composite indicators and their confidence intervals through a particular bootstrap procedure developed by Simar and Wilson (2007); the synthesis procedure characterize a system of weights for a suitable set of simple indicators. To this aim, within the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framew...