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...

Roughly one half of hospitals in the U.S. are in rural areas, yet researchers have largely studied the effects of hospital ownership in the urban context. We examine differences in the provision of profitable and unprofitable medical services in rural areas across nonprofit, for-profit, and...

Conflicting theories of the nonprofit firm have existed for several decades yet empirical research has not resolved these debates, partly because the theories are not easily testable but also because empirical research generally considers organizations in isolation rather than in markets. Here...

This paper analyzes how different organizational structures between funding and implementing agencies affect the quality of aid delivered and social agendas pursued across neighboring villages in a set disaster context. We model the implied objective functions and trade-offs concerning aid...

While the cumulative nature of knowledge is recognized as central to economic growth, the microeconomic foundations of cumulativeness are less understood. This paper investigates the impact of a research-enhancing institution on cumulativeness, highlighting two effects. First, a selection effect...

We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

We examine the patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world. We find that almost universally the largest media firms are owned by the government or by private families. Government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media. Government ownership of the...

Standard models of fiscal federalism suggest many benefits of decentralization in developing economies, and there has been a recent push toward decentralization around the world. However, developing countries presently still have less decentralization, particularly on the revenue side, than both...

To develop new evidence on the effects of hospital ownership and other aspects of hospital market composition on health care productivity, we analyze longitudinal data on the medical expenditures and health outcomes of the vast majority of nonrural elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for...

This paper offers an empirical test of ownership mix efficiency in the U.S. hospital services industry. The test compares the benefits of quality assurance with the costs from the attenuation of property rights that result from an increased presence of nonprofit organizations. The empirical...