This paper explores the cost structure of Swiss hospitals, focusing on differences due to teaching activities and those across different ownership and subsidization types. A stochastic total cost frontier with a Cobb-Douglas functional form has been estimated for a panel of 150 general hospitals...

Pressure on health care systems due to the increasing expenditures of the elderly population is pushing policy makers to adopt new regulation and payment schemes for nursing home services. We sketch a simple theoretical model to predict the behavior of nursing homes under different payment...

In Switzerland, nursing home services are mainly provided by regulated public and private nonprofit organizations. Some of them are created by local governments as foundations. This provides a unique setting to analyze the impact of the institutional form on the performance of nursing homes. We...

Because of evidence of causal association between antibiotic use and bacterial resistance, the implementation of national policies has emerged as a interesting tool for controlling and reversing bacterial resistance. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of public policies on antibiotic...

In this paper we investigate households' demand for school meals using a stated preferences approach. Data are collected through phone-structured interviews to 905 residents with children in the German-speaking region of Switzerland during 2007. A Poisson model with random effects is used to...

We investigate the relationship between costs and quality in nonprofit nursing homes, a key issue in the present context of cost containment measures. In accordance with the economic theory of production, we estimate a three-inputs total cost function for nursing home services using data from 45...

The regulation on prescribing and dispensing of antibiotics has a double purpose: to enhance access to antibiotic treatment and to reduce the inappropriate use of drugs. Nevertheless, incentives to dispensing physicians may lead to inefficiencies. We sketch a theoretical model of the market for...

This paper seeks to explain local variations in the use of antibiotics in the community and to assess the welfare loss due to heterogeneous attitudes towards the risk of bacterial infections and resistance. Significant differences are observed in the per capita antibiotic consumption measured in...

We model demand for different classes of antibiotics used for respiratory infections in outpatient care using a linear approximate almost ideal demand system approach. We compute elasticities to socioeconomic determinants of consumption and own- and cross- price elasticities between different...

The purpose of this study is to analyze the cost structure of Swiss Post’s postal outlets. In particular, the idea is to assess economies of scale and scope in post offices and franchised postal agencies. Information on their optimal size and production structure is of importance from the...