This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program on hospital choice … and consumer welfare for rural residents. The Flex Program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital …

We evaluate whether hospital adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) leads to increases in billing where … financial gains are large or where hassle costs of complete coding are low. The 2007 Medicare payment reform varied both … financial incentives and hassle costs of coding. We find no significant impact of financial incentives on billing levels …

infer returns from hospital entry behavior. We estimate a model of patient flows for CABG patients that provides inputs for …

This paper develops new econometric methods to infer hospital quality in a model with discrete dependent variables and … non-random selection. Mortality rates in patient discharge records are widely used to infer hospital quality. However …, hospital admission is not random and some hospitals may attract patients with greater unobserved severity of illness than …

outcome variables are the risk-adjusted hospital mortality rates for pneumonia (estimated by the authors) and acute myocardial … infarction (reported by the state of California). Measures of competition are constructed for each hospital and payer type. The … of competition for HMO patients decrease risk-adjusted hospital mortality rates. Conversely, increases in competition for …

of market power. We estimate willingness-to-pay models to evaluate hospital market power across analysis areas. We find … that countervailing market power is important: a typical hospital merger would raise hospital prices 4.3% at the 25th …

for surgical ones. We further use a 2008 policy where Medicare implemented financial penalties for certain hospital …A literature has found that medical providers inflate bills and report more conditions given financial incentives. We …