Medical care is characterized by enormous inefficiency. Costs are higher and outcomes worse than almost all analyses of the industry suggest should occur. In other industries characterized by inefficiency, efficient firms expand to take over the market, or new firms enter to eliminate...

We investigate whether top managers affect the performance of large and complex public sector organizations, using as a case study CEOs of English public hospitals (large, complex organizations with multi-million turnover). We study the extent to which CEOs are differentiated in terms of their...

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 reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done in this area over the last 10 years. In addition, there has been increasing...

The health care industry is being transformed. Large firms are merging and acquiring other firms. Alliances and contractual relations between players in this market are shifting rapidly. Within the next few years, many markets are predicted to be dominated by a few large firms. Antitrust...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

We use an extended version of the well-established Crepon, Duguet and Mairesse model (1998) to model the relationship between appropriability mechanisms, innovation and firm-level productivity. We enrich this model in several ways. First, we consider different types of innovation spending and...

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives and productivity growth in incumbent firms? Micro-data suggests that there is heterogeneity across industries--incumbents in technologically advanced industries react positively to foreign firm entry, but not in laggard industries. To explain this...

Inefficiency in the U.S. health care system has often been characterized as quot;flat of the curvequot; spending providing little or no incremental value. In this paper, we draw on macroeconomic models of diffusion and productivity to better explain the empirical patterns of outcome improvements...