We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i …. Softer budgets reduce cost efficiency, while the effect on quality is ambiguous. For given cost efficiency, softer budgets … increase quality since parts of the expenditures may be covered by the payer. However, softer budgets reduce cost …

We analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices, considering both the effect … structure, we show that the relationship between competition and quality is generally ambiguous. In contrast to the received …

dimensions of medication-related quality, namely the probability of inappropriate prescription drug use among United States … relatively close to zero, suggesting that any quality improvements from co-payments are small. …

on health care quality, health care financing and welfare. We show that without patient mobility quality is too low (high … the transfer payment. If the payment is below marginal cost, mobility leads to a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ in quality and lower … welfare in both regions. If the payment is equal to marginal cost, quality and welfare remain unchanged in the high …