Antitrust challenges to hospital mergers have become increasingly common. Empirical studies of hospital prices and costs have generally utilized static measures of concentration and accounting data. This study avoids the difficulties that surround such approaches. Instead, this study seeks an...

Exclusive contracts between hospitals and physicians are common. In most instances they raise no anticompetitive concerns. However, especially in rural markets, exclusive contracts may be used to foreclose actual and potential competitors and thereby decrease competition. The courts should weigh...

What are the economic rationales for the public subsidy of private health insurance? Inducing more people to purchase private cover has the potential to create a positive fiscal externality, as it frees up the limited public beds and other public resources for people who cannot afford private...

The economic and legal view of vertical integration has varied over time, but, a constant source of concern is the fear that the integrated firm will foreclose competitors from intermediate markets. At the same time, most commentators have considered the economics of vertical contracts,...

This symposium is organized around a major, ongoing, antitrust case, In re: Brand Name Prescription Drugs Antitrust Litigation, MDL-997, Master File No.94C 897(Us Federal Court for the Northern District of Illinois). As one can see, this case involves fascinating scientific and policy issues,...

Recent models of firm failure and growth have ignored demand factors. In this paper, we generalize these theoretical analyses to include demand factors in explaining failure and growth for heterogeneous firms in local markets facing imperfect but increasing competition. The model is then applied...

US prison health care has recently been in the news and in the courts. A particular issue is whether prisons should contract out for health care. Contracting out has been growing over the past few decades. The stated motivation for this change ranges from a desire to improve the prison...

The emerging field of corporate demography views corporations and industries in a similar way to human or animal individuals and groups. In spite of a surprisingly large overlap of subject matter with economics, corporate demography is not well-known by, nor easily accessible to economists. An...