The paper examines the heterogeneity with respect to the impact of a financial reform - Activity Based Financing (ABF) - on hospital efficiency in Norway. Measures of technical efficiency and of cost-efficiency are considered. The data set is from a contiguous ten-year panel of 47 hospitals...

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...

Activity-based financing (ABF) was implemented in the Norwegian hospital sector from 1 July 1997. A fraction (30 to 50 per cent) of the block grant from the state to the county councils has been replaced by a matching grant depending upon the number and composition of hospital treatments. As a...

The impact of quality on the demand facing health care providers has important implications for the industrial organization of health care markets. In this paper we study the consumers' choice of general practitioner (GP) assuming they are unable to observe the true quality of GP services. A...

SaniRegio is an econometric model, based on fixed effects panel techniques, that investigates the level of efficiency of Italian Regions in governing their health care systems. As a result of the model, we obtain a measure of the efficient or standardized expenditure that may be compared to the...

This paper empirically evaluates whether government ideology and electoral motives influenced the growth of public health expenditures in 18 OECD countries over the 1971-2004 period. The results suggest that incumbents behaved opportunistically and increased the growth of public health...

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...

This study analyses the role of fundamentals and financial factors in determining firm investment in India with imperfect capital market in a panel VAR framework. Previous research in this area is based on the test of significance (or some variant of this) of the cash flow variable in the...

This paper shows how an airline monopoly uses refundable and non-refundable tickets to screen consumers who are uncertain about their travel. Our theoretical model predicts that the difference between these two fares diminishes as individual demand uncertainty is resolved. Using an original data...

This paper theoretically and empirically explores the effects of insurance parameters and a complementary information environment on patient´s primary prevention activity in the context of a managed care organisation. The theoretical model is based on a principal-agent setting in which the...