Conflicting theories of the nonprofit firm have existed for several decades yet empirical research has not resolved these debates, partly because the theories are not easily testable but also because empirical research generally considers organizations in isolation rather than in markets. Here...

Three types of firms -- nonprofit, for-profit, and government -- own U.S. hospitals, yet we do not know whether ownership results in the specialization of medical service provision. This study of over 30 medical services in urban, general hospitals (1988-2000) shows that ownership types...

Little is known about how the adoption and diffusion of medical innovation is related to and influenced by market characteristics such as competition. The particular complications involved in investigating these relationships in the health care sector may explain the dearth of research. We...

We present the first direct evidence on the relative quality of public and private healthcare in a low-income setting, using a unique set of audit studies. We sent standardized (fake) patients to rural primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, and recorded the quality of care...

Roughly one half of hospitals in the U.S. are in rural areas, yet researchers have largely studied the effects of hospital ownership in the urban context. We examine differences in the provision of profitable and unprofitable medical services in rural areas across nonprofit, for-profit, and...

Using rich panel data from Pakistan, we compute test score based measures of quality (School Value-Addeds or SVAs) for more than 800 schools across 112 villages and verify that they are valid and unbiased. With the SVA measures, we then document three striking features of the schooling...