The Effect of Giving Credit to Social Enterprises: Evidence From Italy

We study how receiving credit from a social bank (Banca Prossima), created in 2008, has affected the economic performance of social enterprises in Italy in the following years. Social enterprises are key providers of welfare services in the country, but due to their legal status as not-for-profit organizations they have difficulty raising capital. Consequently, their growth is often very slow. Credit could replace capital, but not-for-profit organizations are often subject to credit constraints. Moreover, given that they cannot choose the optimal combination of credit and capital, the effect of credit on the economic performance of social enterprises is far from clear. We use a proprietary data set and a difference-in-differences approach to compare social enterprises that received credit from the social bank and those that did not receive it. The results suggest that receivers significantly increase their production, fixed assets, properties, and employment when they have access to new credit. The results are robust to several tests and an alternative identification strategy that combines matching and difference-in-differences methods

Technical efficiency, specialization and ownership form: evidences from a pooling of Italian hospitals

We evaluate how the productive structure and level of specialization of a hospital affect technical efficiency by analyzing a six-year panel database (2000/2005) drawn from hospital discharge records and Ministry of Health data. We adopt a distance function approach, while measuring the technical efficiency level with stochastic frontier techniques. After controlling for environmental variables and hospital case-mix, inefficiency is negatively associated with specialization and positively associated with capitalization. Capitalization is typical of private structures which, on average, use resources less efficiently with respect to public and not-for-profit hospitals. Finally, by looking at scale elasticities, we find some evidence of unexploited economies of scale, leaving room for centralization

What does a cultural district actually do? Critically reappraising 15 years of cultural district policy in Italy

Culture-driven urban and regional strategies have grown since the 1980s in Europe and beyond. Countless initiatives for creative clusters, cultural quarters and culture-led urban policies have mushroomed since the mid-1990s. Being exceptionally rich and dense in cultural amenities and institutions, creative production and cultural consumption, Italy seemed to be the natural ground for such a cultural turn in policymaking. In fact, Italy has been the cradle for cultural districts (CDs) since the early 2000s, fostering both analytical and normative speculations and experiments. Despite this richness, a systematic study of CD policy implementation is lacking and several questions are still pending, in Italy as well as in other countries. For example, how diverse are the CD experiences being developed; and what are the aims and core activities, the urban and regional settings and development effects? This paper presents an original survey of 68 experimentations that were officially labelled as ‘cultural districts’ over the last 15 years in Italy: as such it constitutes the first attempt at a nation-wide comprehensive analysis of CD policy. Even though the major importance of CDs as an analytical tool is acknowledged, the evidence gathered in this study shows the fuzziness and inconsistencies in the implementation of CD policy in Italy. The analysis shows the uneven regional geography of CDs, stresses the large variety of contents and promoters and high rate of failure, and the limited degree of specialization and integration with cultural industries. The paper reconsiders critically the policy notion and practice of CDs in Italy and calls for further international scholarly and policy debates

Comparing the Efficiency of Hospitals in Italy and Germany: Nonparametric Conditional Approach Based on Partial Frontier

Traditional nonparametric frontier techniques to measure hospital efficiency have been criticized for their deterministic nature and the inability to incorporate external factors into the analysis. Moreover, efficiency estimates represent a relative measure meaning that the implications from a hospital efficiency analysis based on a single-country dataset are limited by the availability of suitable benchmarks. Our first objective is to demonstrate the application of advanced nonparametric methods that overcome the limitations of the traditional nonparametric frontier techniques. Our second objective is to provide guidance on how an international comparison of hospital efficiency can be conducted using the example of two countries: Italy and Germany. We rely on a partial frontier of order-m to obtain efficiency estimates robust to outliers and extreme values. We use the conditional approach to incorporate hospital and regional characteristics into the estimation of efficiency. The obtained conditional efficiency estimates may deviate from the traditional unconditional efficiency estimates, which do not account for the potential influence of operational environment on the production possibilities. We nonparametrically regress the ratios of conditional to unconditional efficiency estimates to examine the relation of hospital and regional characteristics with the efficiency performance. We show that the two countries can be compared against a common frontier when the challenges of international data compatibility are successfully overcome. The results indicate that there are significant differences in the production possibilities of Italian and German hospitals. Moreover, hospital characteristics, particularly bed-size category, ownership status, and specialization, are significantly related to differences in efficiency performance across the analyzed hospitals