Krankenkassen, Krankenhausverbände und der Bund beklagen unisono die öffentliche Unterfinanzierung der deutschen Krankenhausinfrastruktur. Zuständig für die Infrastruktur sind die Länder, die seit Jahren die Haushaltsmittel für Krankenhausinvestitionen reduzieren. In diesem Beitrag werden...

In this article, we analyse the optimal investment decision in a new health care technology of a representative hospital that maximises its surplus in an uncertain environment. The new technology allows the hospital to increase the quality level of the care provided, but the investment is...

One cornerstone of current attempts to reform the German public health care system by introducing private insurance schemes is the assumption that economic incentives play an important role in individual decision-making about using medical help. This hypothesis is examined for the case of demand...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high-benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

Using a newly available and multifaceted dataset provided by the German Federal Statistical Office, this paper is the first to investigate both technical and cost efficiency of more than 1500 German general hospitals conducting a stochastic frontier analysis. The empirical results for the years...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure,and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a...

Over the last 20 years, acute care hospitals in most OECD have built up costly overcapacities. From the perspective of economic policy, it is desirable to know how hospitals of different ownership form respond to changes in demand and are probably best suited to deal with existing...

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI...

We analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices, considering both the effect of (i) introducing competition (monopoly versus competition) and (ii) increasing competition through lower transportation costs (increased substitutability) or a higher number...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...