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...

We examine the role of employee health in Private Equity buyouts using employee-level data on employment, wages, medical prescriptions, and health expenditures of more than 55,000 buyout employees. Employees with a lower health status before the buyout face the most substantial losses of income...

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...

Pharmaceutical markets are complex. Multiple agents, including doctors, insurers, and pharmacies, play critical roles that affect competition between manufacturers and patient choice between drugs. This complexity, however, is neglected in standard antitrust analysis. In evaluating proposed...

Debate continues on whether consolidation in health care markets enhances efficiency and quality or instead facilitates collusion and market power. We address this issue by comparing the quality of patient care in hospitals before and after mergers and acquisitions which occurred in California...

Medical device expenditures are an important driver of the growth in health care spending and hospitals pay significantly different prices for the same medical device. This paper uses hospitals’ acquisition data to explore the determinants of price discrimination in the acquisition of medical...

The most hazardous health reform measure before Congress is not the so-called "public option," but proposals to make health insurance compulsory via an individual or employer mandate.Compulsory health insurance could require nearly 100 million Americans to switch to a more expensive health plan...