Hospital markets have become highly concentrated due to increasing numbers of mergers and acquisitions. These consolidations in hospital markets may have anticompetitive or procompetitive effects due to increasing market power, economies of scale and scope and quality consequences. In this...

The paper examines how hospital cost efficiency has reacted to extensive horizontal integrations of hospitals and rapid growth of managed care in the US health care industry. Cost efficiency is estimated by using panel data approaches to relax the assumptions for the hospital effects imposed in...