There are no ready-made data on hospital outputs and inputs which would allow comprehensive international comparisons of hospital efficiency to be carried out. This paper, therefore, relies on selected evidence to compare hospital efficiency in a subset of OECD countries, based on three...

The control function in the semiparametric selection model is zero at infinity. This paper proposes additional restrictions of the same type and shows how to use them to test assumed exclusion restrictions necessary for root N estimation of the model. The test is based on the estimated control...

In this paper, we propose a new method to assess the impact of sovereign ratings on sovereign bond yields. We estimate the impulse response of the interest rate, following a change in the rating. Since ratings are ordinal and moreover extremely persistent, it proves difficult to estimate those...

In this paper, we propose a new method to assess the impact of sovereign ratings on sovereign bond yields. We estimate the impulse response of the interest rate, following a change in the rating. Since ratings are ordinal and moreover extremely persistent, it proves difficult to estimate those...

The paper estimates cost efficiency of 81 general hospitals in the Czech Republic during 2006-2010. We employ the conditional order-m approach which is a nonparametric method for efficiency computation accounting for environmental variables. Effects of environmental variables are assessed using...

Empirical evidence on economies of scale in healthcare is mostly based on the cost effects of hospital mergers. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper approaches the economies of scale issue by analysing the break-ups of municipal health centre federations. We use the...

The paper estimates cost efficiency of 99 general hospitals in the Czech Republic during 2001-2008 using Stochastic Frontier Analysis. We estimate a baseline model and also a model accounting for various inefficiency determinants. Group-specific inefficiency is present even having taken care of...

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...

This paper examines the cost efficiency in the nursing home industry, an issue of concern to Swiss policy makers because of the explosive growth of national expenditure on elderly care and the aging of the population. A stochastic cost frontier model has been applied to a panel of 1780...

This paper develops a new factor-analysis-based (FAB) approach for choosing the optimal direction in a directional distance function (DDF) analysis. It has the combined merits of factor analysis and slacks-based measure (SBM) and incorporates the relative ease with which various input-output...