This paper examines the staffing, division of labor, and resulting profitability of primary care physician practices. We develop a theoretical model of how practice profit is determined by the number and mix of support staff and how tasks are delegated to support staff. A key element of the...

This paper examines the incentives of CEOs in a large sample of nonprofit hospitals. The evidence indicates that both turnover and compensation of these CEOs are significantly related to financial performance (return on assets). We find no evidence that nonprofit hospitals provide explicit...

This paper examines the incentives of CEOs in a large sample of nonprofit hospitals. The evidence suggests that the relations between financial performance (return on assets) and CEO turnover and compensation are as strong in nonprofit hospitals as in for-profit hospitals and other for-profit...

This study provides evidence on the determinants of contract duration using a large sample of franchise contracts. We find that the term of the contract systematically increases with the franchisee's physical and human capital investments, measures of recontracting costs, and the franchisor's...

This paper examines the incentives of CEOs in not-for-profit institutions to engage in earnings management. We predict and find that, with one exception, this different setting induces CEOs to engage in patterns of earnings management that are similar to those of their for-profit counterparts....

This article reports the survey results from attendees at a large US health-care conference. Conference attendees were polled on a number of healthcare reform issues along with some basic demographic information. Few significant differences were found based on respondents’ gender, or...

Health plans create competition among hospitals by threatening to “steer” patients to preferred facilities. Mergers can reduce this competition and economists have begun using travel cost demand models to predict their effects. In this paper, we document an anomaly in estimation: for any...

This amicus brief was filed in Federal Trade Commission v. Phoebe Putney Health System, Inc., in which the FTC has obtained review of an 11th Circuit decision that insulated a merger of two nonprofit hospitals from antitrust scrutiny. We make two arguments in the amicus brief. First, there is no...

We hypothesize that, unlike for-profit firms, nonprofit hospitals have incentives to manage earnings to a range just above zero. We consider two ways managers can achieve this. They can adjust discretionary spending [Hoerger, T.J., 1991. Profit variability in for-profit and not-for-profit...

The American Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have developed new standards to curb the influence sales representatives may have on physicians' drug choices. Yet the literature fails to clarify the extent to which shares of prescriptions for branded...