The recent rise of specialty hospitals -- typically for-profit firms that are at least partially owned by physicians -- has led to substantial debate about their effects on the cost and quality of care. Advocates of specialty hospitals claim they improve quality and lower cost; critics contend...

The health sector is filled with institutions and decision-making circumstances that create friction in markets and cognitive errors by decision makers. This paper examines the potential contributions to health economics of the ideas of behavioral economics. The discussion presented here focuses...

We use simple economic insights to develop a framework for distinguishing between prejudice and statistical discrimination using observational data. We focus our inquiry on the enormous literature in healthcare where treatment disparities by race and gender are not explained by access,...

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital merger. These mergers are initiated by a regulator, acting on behalf of the public, and justified on the grounds...

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between human capital and organizational performance. We use detailed longitudinal monthly data on nursing units in the Veterans Administration hospital system to identify how the human capital (general, hospital-specific and unit or...

Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality inputs, as oligopolistic...

The United States aspires to use information from comparative effectiveness research (CER) to reduce waste and contain costs without instituting a formal rationing mechanism or compromising patient or physician autonomy with regard to treatment choices. With such ambitious goals, traditional...

Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in justifying a system of medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on the relationship between medical liability forces on the one hand and medical errors and health care quality on the other. In this...

Mergers that affiliate a hospital with a Catholic owner, network, or system reduce the set of possible reproductive medical procedures since Catholic hospitals have strict prohibitions on contraception. Using changes in ownership of hospitals, we find that Catholic hospitals reduce the per bed...

The goal of this paper is to identify key issues concerning the nature of competition in health care markets and its impacts on quality and social welfare and to identify pertinent findings from the theoretical and empirical literature on this topic. The theoretical literature in economics on...