An extensive literature relating patients' expectations to treatment outcomes has not addressed the determinants of these expectations. We argue that treatment history is part of a reference point that influences the patients' expectations of how effective further treatment might be, thus...

Efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades. Despite this attention, few studies have examined whether a provider's efficiency varies on a monthly, quarterly or other, sub-annual basis. This article presents an...

Cost shifting for a non-profit, revenue maximizing healthcare provider which faces a constraint that profit must be non-negative is examined, focusing on fixed payment programmes like Medicare. In addition, how grant money affects cost shifting and extend the empirical analysis of cost shifting...

Dynamic effects of health and inter-state and inter-industry knowledge spillovers, Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth and convergence in US agriculture are examined using recently developed procedures for panel data and a growth accounting model. Strong evidence is found to support the...

We analyse family decisions to participate in community-based universal substance-abuse prevention programmes through the framework of expected utility theory. Family functioning, which has been shown to be a good indicator of child risk for substance abuse, provides a useful reference point for...

Researchers often use the discrepancy between self-reported and biochemically assessed active smoking status to argue that self-reported smoking status is not reliable, ignoring the limitations of biochemically assessed measures and treating it as the gold standard in their comparisons. Here, we...

We analyze the work choice of welfare recipients. Potential welfare recipients compare their on and off welfare utility from after-tax income and in-kind benefits via employment or welfare, and choose whether to work. Our null hypothesis, which we reject, is that benefits affect only the...

Nonprofit firms that produce multiple outputs may lower service intensity for one patient group in response to lower reimbursements for another group. This is termed 'cost-adjusting' behaviour. Cost-adjusting implies a serious welfare transfer. The results of this analysis suggest that the...