Prices for consultations with General Practitioners (GPs) in Australia are unregulated, and patients pay the difference between the price set by the GP and a fixed reimbursement from the national tax-funded Medicare insurance scheme. We construct a Vickrey-Salop model of GP price and quality...

We examine the implications of policies to improve information about the qualities of profit seeking duopoly hospitals which face the same regulated price and compete on quality. We show that if the hospital costs of quality are similar then better information increases the quality of both...

Australia introduced an incentive payment scheme for general practitioners to ensure systematic and high quality care in chronic disease management. There is little empirical evidence and ambiguous theoretical guidance on which effects to expect on the quality of care. This paper evaluates the...

A number of studies suggest there is an over-supply of specialists and an undersupply of GPs in many developed countries. Previous econometric studies of specialty choice from the US suggest that a number of factors play a role, including expected future earnings, educational debt, and having...

We investigate differences in patients’ length of stay between National Health Service (NHS) public hospitals, public treatment centres and private treatment centres that provide elective (non-emergency) hip replacement to publicly-funded patients. We find that private treatment centres and...

This paper applies latent-class and multinomial logit models to the choice of hospital for cataract operations in the UK NHS. We concentrate on the effects of travel time and waiting time and especially on the waiting time elasticity of demand. Models including hospital fixed effects rely on...

This paper proposes a method of deriving a hospital quality performance indicator using mortality outcome measures. The method aggregates any number of mortality outcome measures observed over several years into a single indicator. We begin with the supposition that there exists an abstract...

We use unpublished establishment level data of Australian manufacturing from 1993-94 and 1996-97 censuses to study how trade liberalisation affects productivity. More specifically, we use the variation in the extent of trade liberalisation across four digit ANZSIC manufacturing industries...

This paper presents the main findings from a study of six industrial capabilities in leading Victorian sectors. The capabilities included manufacturing, design, information and communications technology (ICT), biotechnology, environment technologies and business services. Eighty-eight companies...

The Australian government implemented a series of new private health insurance policies between 1997 and 2000. As a result, the proportion of the population with private health insurance coverage increased by more than 35%. However, this paper finds significant evidence that the policy reform...