Evidence suggests that hospital mergers can reduce costs but less is known about their effects on patient outcomes. We study how a wave of mergers that led to the shutdown of one third of all Swedish maternity wards affected the health of mothers who gave birth and their newborns. Applying a...

Evidence suggests that hospital mergers can reduce costs but less is known about their effects on patient outcomes. We study how a wave of mergers that led to the shutdown of one third of all Swedish maternity wards affected the health of mothers who gave birth and their newborns. Applying a...

Applying principles of merger evaluation to the health care industry in general, and to hospital markets in particular, poses several unique challenges. Definition of relevant geographic markets and assessment of the consequences of changes in competition for patient and social welfare are...

Applying principles of merger evaluation to the health care industry in general, and to hospital markets in particular, poses several unique challenges. Definition of relevant geographic markets and assessment of the consequences of changes in competition for patient and social welfare are...

We estimate a bargaining model of competition between hospitals and managed care organizations (MCOs) and use the estimates to evaluate the effects of hospital mergers. We find that MCO bargaining restrains hospital prices significantly. The model demonstrates the potential impact of coinsurance...

Using a spatial competition framework with three ex ante identical hospitals, we study the effects of a hospital merger on quality, price and welfare. The merging hospitals always reduce quality, but the non-merging hospital responds by reducing quality if prices are fixed and increasing quality...

We assess the performance of three hospital merger simulation methods by means of a Monte Carlo experiment. We first specify a rich theoretical model of hospital markets and use it to generate “true” price effects of a large number of hospital mergers. We then use the theoretical model to...

Mergers in the pharmaceutical sector warrant special scrutiny not only because of concerns over affordability of medicines, but also because the institutional details of pharmaceutical markets complicate the economic analysis of merger effects. Standard anti-trust analysis of mergers, in...