Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...

The French hospital industry is one example of a market where public, private nonprofit and private for-profit hospitals co-exist in significant proportions. Recently, several administrative reports have shown that in France public and private nonprofit hospitals are more costly than for-profit...

This paper studies the relationship between the diffusion of innovative procedures for the treatment of heart attack and distributions of the cost and length of hospital stays. Using a sample of 5,681 stays observed in French public hospitals, we use microsimulation techniques to highlight...

The purpose of this paper is to study hospital costs in the event of introduction of a Prospective Payment System in France. We use a nested three dimensional database (stays-hospitals-years) to identify hospital unobservable heterogeneity and a transitory moral hazard component of cost...

Mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals are investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Our results show that innovative procedures play a key role in explaining the effect of ownership status...