Amidst demographic shifts, advanced economies are facing critical nursing shortages. This study analyzes strategies of German nursing care providers to address these shortages using administrative data for the period 2007 to 2017. Our analysis reveals that higher nursing shortages correlate with...

In times of peak demand hospitals may fail to deliver the high standard of treatment quality that they are able to offer their patients at regular times. To assess the magnitude of these effects, this study analyzes the effects of low staff-to-patients ratios on patient outcomes empirically. We...

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure,and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a...