we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used … where hospital closures reallocate large numbers of patients to hospitals of different quality. This setting allows us to … measure whether patient outcomes improve as much as quality indicators predict when a relatively low-quality hospital closes …

other factor that equilibrates the market. Estimates of the consumer response to quality may consequently be attenuated, if … the limited capacity of individual providers prevents some consumers from obtaining higher quality. We propose a tractable … this improves forecasts of the consumer response to quality. We then apply this method to the market for heart surgery, and …

practices. Such integration could improve quality by promoting care coordination, but could also worsen it by impacting care … improves operational efficiency measured by physicians' throughput, it negatively affects quality and overall spending. We note …