The recent rise of specialty hospitals -- typically for-profit firms that are at least partially owned by physicians -- has led to substantial debate about their effects on the cost and quality of care. Advocates of specialty hospitals claim they improve quality and lower cost; critics contend...

While prior studies tend to view hospital integration through the lens of horizontal consolidation, I provide an analysis of its vertical aspects. I examine the effect of hospital acquisitions in New York State on the distribution of market share for major cardiac procedures across providers in...

We examine the recent increase in hospital advertising expenditures. We first illustrate that the rise in hospital advertising has not been universal. Large, not-for-profit, teaching hospitals have, by far, experienced the largest increase in spending. Adjusting for size, for-profit hospitals...

This paper examines consolidation in the Massachusetts hospital market. We find that consolidation is driven primarily by a large decline in the demand for hospital beds, resulting from increased enrollment in managed care and technological changes. The drive to consolidate appears through three...

We studied the relation of CEO pay and turnover to performance and characteristics of companies in a new data set that covers large commercial banks over the period 1982-87. For newly hired CEOs, the elasticity of pay with respect to assets is about one-third. As experience increases, the...

Conventional outcomes report cards-- public disclosure of information about the patient-background-adjusted health outcomes of individual hospitals and physicians -- may help improve quality, but they may also encourage providers to "game" the system by avoiding sick and/or seeking healthy...

The impact of labor turnover on productivity has received a great deal of attention in the literature on organizations. We consider the impact of cohort turnover -- the simultaneous exit of a large number of experienced employees and a similarly sized entry of new workers -- on productivity in...

During the past two decades, several public and private organizations have initiated programs to report publicly on the quality of medical care provided by specific hospitals and physicians. These programs have sparked broad debate among economists and policy makers concerning whether, and to...

Several observers have suggested that highly skilled workers convey little in the way of competitive advantage for firms due to their mobility. Implicit in this view is the belief that organizations are not important in determining the performance of such individuals. In this study, we address...

A puzzling feature of many medical innovations is that they simultaneously appear to reduce unit costs and increase total costs. We consider this phenomenon by examining the diffusion of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) -- a treatment for coronary artery disease -- over the...