Economic theory predicts that outsourcing public services to private firms will reduce costs, but the effect on quality is ambiguous. We explore quality differences between publicly and privately owned ambulances in a setting where patients are as good as randomly assigned to ambulances of...

Australia has a rich public-private mix of financing and provision of healthcare. Since mid-2015, the higher growth in out of pocket costs relative to the growth in wages began to reduce the affordability of private healthcare and marked the start of the drop in private health insurance...

To measure healthcare accessibility, a previous study formulated a stochastic cost frontier model, and applied it to distances of communal centres from nearest emergency hospitals in Chile. Based on a larger set of variables, this study re-estimates the distance threshold, and tests alternative...

Major disparities in the cost of health care have made the pricing of specialist and hospital services a contentious issue in South Africa, particularly in the private sector. To help inform policy debate, this paper profiles selected experiences on the pricing of health services, competition...

I apply a Bayesian persuasion framework to study information transmission in the physician-patient relationship. I highlight each party’s financial incentives in this transmission and the subsequent determination of medical treatment outcomes. I estimate the model using a large database of...

Conceived in an effort to improve clinical operations, patient experience, and medical quality, physician-owned hospitals (POHs) flourished until 2003, when industry concerns over patient selection, cost of care, and overutilization prompted government oversight and legislation. Subsequent...

In recent years, several countries have introduced non-monetary performance incentives for health care providers to improve the quality of medical care. Evidence on the effect of non-monetary feedback incentives, predominantly in the form of public quality reporting, on the quality of medical...

Appointing or electing professionals to be public officials is a double-edged sword. Experts can use their rich knowledge to implement reforms, but they can also favor their own profession. In this study, we compare physician-trained state health ministers to ministers of other professions in...